Chapter IX: Part 9

d) The occasion for releasing comic pleasure vanishes when the attention is fixed on the comparison capable of giving rise to the comic. Under such circumstances the comic force is lost from that which is otherwise sure to produce a comic effect. A movement or a mental activity cannot become comical to him whose interest is fixed at the time of comparing this movement with a standard which distinctly presents itself to him. Thus the examiner does not see the comical in the nonsense produced by the student in his ignorance; he is simply annoyed by it, whereas the offender’s classmates who are more interested in his chances of passing the examination than in what he knows, laugh heartily over the same nonsense. The teacher of dancing or gymnastics seldom has any eyes for the comic movements of his pupils, and the preacher entirely loses sight of humanity’s defects of character, which the writer of comedy brings out with so much effect. The comic process cannot stand examination by the attention, it must be able to proceed absolutely unnoticed in a manner similar to wit. But for good reasons, it would contradict the nomenclature of “conscious processes” which I have used in _The Interpretation of Dreams_, if one wished to call it of necessity _unconscious_. It rather belongs to the _foreconscious_, and one may use the fitting name “automatic” for all those processes which are enacted in the foreconscious and dispense with the attention energy which is connected with consciousness. The process of comparison of the expenditures must remain automatic if it is to produce comic pleasure.

_Conditions Disturbing the Discharge_

e) It is exceedingly disturbing to the comic if the case from which it originates gives rise at the same time to a marked release of affect. The discharge of the affective difference is then as a rule excluded. Affects, disposition, and the attitude of the individual in occasional cases make it clear that the comic comes or goes with the viewpoint of the individual person; that only in exceptional cases is there an absolute comic. The dependence or relativity of the comic is therefore much greater than of wit, which never happens but is regularly made, and at its production one may already give attention to the conditions under which it finds acceptance. But affective development is the most intensive of the conditions which disturb the comic, the significance of which is well known.[79] It is therefore said that the comic feeling comes most in tolerably indifferent cases which evince no strong feelings or interests. Nevertheless it is just in cases with affective release that one may witness the production of a particularly strong expenditure-difference in the automatism of discharge. When Colonel Butler answers Octavio’s admonitions with “bitter laughter,” exclaiming:

“Thanks from the house of Austria!”

his bitterness has thus not prevented the laughter which results from the recollection of the disappointment which he believes he has experienced; and on the other hand, the magnitude of this disappointment could not have been more impressively depicted by the poet than by showing it capable of affecting laughter in the midst of the storm of unchained affects. It is my belief that this explanation may be applicable in all cases in which laughing occurs on other than pleasurable occasions, and in conjunction with exceedingly painful or tense affects.

f) If we also mention that the development of the comic pleasure can be promoted by means of any other pleasurable addition to the case which acts like a sort of contact-effect (after the manner of the fore-pleasure principle in the tendency-wit), then we have discussed surely not all the conditions of comic pleasure, yet enough of them to serve our purpose. We then see that no other assumption so easily covers these conditions, as well as the inconstancy and dependence of the comic effect, as this: the assumption that comic pleasure is derived from the discharge of a difference, which under many conditions can be diverted to a different use than discharge.

It still remains to give a thorough consideration of the comic of the sexual and obscene, but we shall only skim over it with a few observations. Here, too, we shall take the act of exposing one’s body as the starting-point. An accidental exposure produces a comical effect on us, because we compare the ease with which we attained the enjoyment of this view with the great expenditure otherwise necessary for the attainment of this object. The case thus comes nearer to the naïve-comic, but it is simpler than the latter. In every case of exhibitionism in which we are made spectators—or, in the case of the smutty joke hearers,—we play the part of the third person, and the person exposed is made comical. We have heard that it is the purpose of wit to replace obscenity and in this manner to reopen a source of comic pleasure that has been lost. On the contrary, spying out an exposure forms no example of the comic for the one spying, because the effort he exerts thereby abrogates the condition of comic pleasure; the only thing remaining is the sexual pleasure in what is seen. If the spy relates to another what he has seen, the person looked at again becomes comical, because the viewpoint that predominates is that the expenditure was omitted which would have been necessary for the concealment of the private parts. At all events, the sphere of the sexual or obscene offers the richest opportunities for gaining comic pleasure beside the pleasurable sexual stimulation, as it exposes the person’s dependence on his physical needs (degradation) or it can uncover behind the spiritual love the physical demands of the same (unmasking.)

_The Psychogenesis of the Comic_

An invitation to seek the understanding of the comic in its psychogenesis comes surprisingly from Bergson’s well written and stimulating book _Laughter_. Bergson, whose formula for the conception of the comic character has already become known to us—“mechanization of life,” “the substitution of something mechanical for the natural”—reaches by obvious associations from automatism to the automaton, and seeks to trace a series of comic effects to the blurred memories of children’s toys. In this connection he once reaches this viewpoint, which, to be sure, he soon drops; he seeks to trace the comic to the after-effect of childish pleasure. “Perhaps we ought even to carry simplification still farther, and, going back to our earliest recollection, try to discover in the games that amused us as children the first faint traces of the combinations that make us laugh as grown-up persons.”... “Above all, we are too apt to ignore the childish element, so to speak, latent in most of our joyful emotions” (p. 67). As we have now traced wit to that childish playing with words and thoughts which is prohibited by the rational critic, we must be tempted to trace also these infantile roots of the comic, conjectured by Bergson.

As a matter of fact we meet a whole series of conditions which seem most promising, when we examine the relation of the comic to the child. The child itself does not by any means seem comic to us, although its character fulfills all conditions which, in comparison to our own, would result in a comic difference. Thus we see the immoderate expenditure of motion as well as the slight psychic expenditure, the control of the psychic activities through bodily functions, and other features. The child gives us a comic impression only when it does not behave as a child but as an earnest grown-up, and even then it affects us only in the same manner as other persons in disguise; but as long as it retains the nature of the child our perception of it furnishes us a pure pleasure, which perhaps recalls the comic. We call it naïve in so far as it displays to us the absence of inhibitions, and we call naïve-comic those of its utterances which in another we would have considered obscene or witty.

On the other hand the child lacks all feeling for the comic. This sentence seems to say no more than that this comic feeling, like many others, first makes its appearance in the course of psychic development; and that would by no means be remarkable, especially since we must admit that it shows itself distinctly even during years which must be accredited to childhood. Nevertheless it can be demonstrated that the assertion that the child lacks feeling for the comic has a deeper meaning than one would suppose. In the first place it will readily be seen that it cannot be different, if our conception is correct, that the comic feeling results from a difference of expenditure produced in the effort to understand the other. Let us again take comic motion as an example. The comparison which furnishes the difference reads as follows, when put in conscious formulæ: “So he does it,” and: “So I would do it,” or “So I have done it.” But the child lacks the standard contained in the second sentence, it understands simply through imitation; it just does it. Education of the child furnishes it with the standard: “So you shall do it,” and if it now makes use of the same in comparisons, the nearest conclusion is: “He has not done it right, and I can do it better.” In this case it laughs at the other, it laughs at him with a feeling of superiority. There is nothing to prevent us from tracing this laughter also to a difference of expenditure; but according to the analogy with the examples of laughter occurring in us we may conclude that the comic feeling is not experienced by the child when it laughs as an expression of superiority. It is a laughter of pure pleasure. In our own case whenever the judgment of our own superiority occurs we smile rather than laugh, or if we laugh, we are still able to distinguish clearly this conscious realization of our superiority from the comic which makes us laugh.

It is probably correct to say that in many cases which we perceive as “comical” and which we cannot explain, the child laughs out of pure pleasure, whereas the child’s motives are clear and assignable. If, for instance, some one slips on the street and falls, we laugh because this impression—we know not why—is comical. The child laughs in the same case out of a feeling of superiority or out of joy over the calamity of others. It amounts to saying: “You fell, but I did not.” Certain pleasure motives of the child seems to be lost for us grown-ups, but as a substitute for these we perceive under the same conditions the “comic” feeling.

_The Infantile and the Comic_

If we were permitted to generalize, it would seem very tempting to transfer the desired specific character of the comic into the awakening of the infantile, and to conceive the comic as a regaining of “lost infantile laughing.” One could then say, “I laugh every time over a difference of expenditure between the other and myself, when I discover in the other the child.” Or expressed more precisely, the whole comparison leading to the comic would read as follows:

“He does it this way—I do it differently—
He does it just as I did when I was a child.”

This laughter would thus result every time from the comparison between the ego of the grown-up and the ego of the child. The uncertainty itself of the comic difference, causing now the lesser and now the greater expenditure to appear comical to me, would correspond to the infantile determination; the comic therein is actually always on the side of the infantile.

This is not contradicted by the fact that the child itself as an object of comparison does not make a comic impression on me but a purely pleasurable one, nor by the fact that this comparison with the infantile produces a comic effect only when any other use of the difference is avoided. For the conditions of the discharge come thereby into consideration. Everything that confines a psychic process in an association of ideas works against the discharge of the surplus occupation of energy and directs the same to other utilization; whatever isolates a psychic act favors the discharge. By consciously focussing on the child as the person of comparison, the discharge necessary for the production of comic pleasure therefore becomes impossible; only in foreconscious energetic states is there a similar approach to the isolation which we may moreover also ascribe to the psychic processes in the child. The addition to the comparison: “Thus I have also done it as a child,” from which the comic effect would emanate, could come into consideration for the average difference only when no other association could obtain control over the freed surplus.

If we still continue with our attempt to find the nature of the comic in the foreconscious association of the infantile, we have to go a step further than Bergson and admit that the comparison resulting in the comic need not necessarily awake old childish pleasure and play, but that it is enough if it touches the childish nature in general, perhaps even childish pain. Herein we deviate from Bergson, but remain consistent with ourselves, when we connect the comic pleasure not with remembered pleasure but always with a comparison. This is possible, for cases of the first kind comprise in a measure those which are regularly and irresistibly comic. Let us now draw up the scheme of the comic possibilities instanced above. We stated that the comic difference would be found either

(a) through a comparison between the other and one’s self, or (b) through a comparison altogether within the other, or (c) through a comparison altogether within one’s self.

In the first case the other would appear to me as a child, in the second he would put himself on the level of a child, and in the third I would find the child in myself. To the first class belong the comic of movement and of forms, of psychic activity and of character. The infantile corresponding to it would be the motion-impulse and the inferior mental and moral development of the child, so that the fool would perhaps become comical to me by reminding me of a lazy child, and the bad person by reminding me of a naughty child. The only time one might speak of a childish pleasure lost to grown-ups would be where the child’s own motion pleasure came into consideration.

The second case, in which the comic altogether depends on identification with the other, comprises numerous possibilities such as the comic situation, exaggeration (caricature), imitation, degradation, and unmasking. It is under this head that the presentation of infantile viewpoints mostly take place. For the comic situation is largely based on embarrassment, in which we feel again the helplessness of the child. The worst of these embarrassments, the disturbance of other activities through the imperative demands of natural wants, corresponds to the child’s lack of control of the physical functions. Where the comic situation acts through repetitions it is based on the pleasure of constant repetition peculiar to the child (asking questions, telling stories), through which it makes itself a nuisance to grown-ups. Exaggeration, which also affords pleasure even to the grown-up in so far as it is justified by his reason, corresponds to the characteristic want of moderation in the child, and its ignorance of all quantitative relations which it later really learns to know as qualitative. To keep within bounds, to practice moderation even in permissible feelings is a late fruit of education, and is gained through opposing inhibitions of the psychic activity acquired in the same association. Wherever this association is weakened as in the unconscious of dreams and in the monoideation of the psychoneuroses, the want of moderation of the child again makes its appearance.

The understanding of comic imitation has caused us many difficulties so long as we left out of consideration the infantile factor. But imitation is the child’s best art and is the impelling motive of most of its playing. The child’s ambition is not so much to distinguish himself among his equals as to imitate the big fellows. The relation of the child to the grown-up determines also the comic of degradation, which corresponds to the lowering of the grown-up in the life of the child. Few things can afford the child greater pleasure than when the grown-up lowers himself to its level, disregards his superiority, and plays with the child as its equal. The alleviation which furnishes the child pure pleasure is a debasement used by the adult as a means of making things comic and as a source of comic pleasure. As for unmasking we know that it is based on degradation.

The infantile determination of the third case, the comic of expectation, presents most of the difficulties; this really explains why those authors who put this case to the foreground in their conception of the comic, found no occasion to consider the infantile factor in their studies of the comic. The comic of expectation is farthest from the child’s thoughts, the ability to understand this is the latest quality to appear in him. Most of those cases which produce a comic effect in the grown-up are probably felt by the child as a disappointment. One can refer, however, to the blissful expectation and gullibility of the child in order to understand why one considers himself as comical “as a child,” when he succumbs to comic disappointment.

If the preceding remarks produce a certain probability that the comic feeling may be translated into the thought; everything is comic that does not fit the grown-up, I still do not feel bold enough,—in view of my whole position to the problem of the comic—to defend this last proposition with the same earnestness as those that I formulated before. I am unable to decide whether the lowering to the level of the child is only a special case of comic degradation, or whether everything comical fundamentally depends on the degradation to the level of the child.[80]

_Humor_

An examination of the comic, however superficial it may be, would be most incomplete if it did not devote at least a few remarks to the consideration of _humor_. There is so little doubt as to the essential relationship between the two that a tentative explanation of the comic must furnish at least one component for the understanding of humor. It does not matter how much appropriate and important material was presented as an appreciation of humor, which, as one of the highest psychic functions, enjoys the special favor of thinkers, we still cannot elude the temptation to express its essence through an approach to the formulæ given for wit and the comic.

We have heard that the release of painful emotions is the strongest hindrance to the comic effect. Just as aimless motion causes harm, stupidity mischief, and disappointment pain;—the possibility of a comic effect eventually ends, at least for him who cannot defend himself against such pain, who is himself affected by it or must participate in it, whereas the disinterested party shows by his behavior that the situation of the case in question contains everything necessary to produce comic effect. Humor is thus a means to gain pleasure despite the painful affects which disturb it; it acts as a substitute for this affective development, and takes its place. If we are in a situation which tempts us to liberate painful affects according to our habits, and motives then urge us to suppress these affects _statu nascendi_, we have the conditions for humor. In the cases just cited the person affected by misfortune, pain, etc., could obtain humoristic pleasure while the disinterested party laughs over the comic pleasure. We can only say that the pleasure of humor results at the cost of this discontinued liberation of affect; it originates through the _economized expenditure of affect_.

_The Economy in Expenditure of Affect_

Humor is the most self-sufficient of the forms of the comic; its process consummating itself in one single person and the participation of another adds nothing new to it. I can enjoy the pleasure of humor originating in myself without feeling the necessity of imparting it to another. It is not easy to tell what happens dining the production of humoristic pleasure in a person; but one gains a certain insight by investigating these cases of humor which have emanated from persons with whom we have entered into a sympathetic understanding. By sympathetically understanding the humoristic person in these cases one gets the same pleasure. The coarsest form of humor, the so-called humor of the gallows or grim-humor (_Galgenhumor_), may enlighten us in this regard. The rogue, on being led to execution on Monday, remarked: “Yes, this week is beginning well.” This is really a witticism, as the remark is quite appropriate in itself, on the other hand it is displaced in the most nonsensical fashion, as there can be no further happening for him this week. But it required humor to make such wit, that is, to overlook what distinguished the beginning of this week from other weeks, and to deny the difference which could give rise to motives for very particular emotional feelings. The case is the same when on the way to the gallows he requests a neckerchief for his bare neck, in order to guard against taking cold, a precaution which would be quite praiseworthy under different circumstances, but becomes exceedingly superfluous and indifferent in view of the impending fate of this same neck. We must say that there is something like greatness of soul in this _blague_, in this clinging to his usual nature and in deviating from that which would overthrow and drive this nature into despair. This form of grandeur of humor thus appears unmistakably in cases in which our admiration is not inhibited by the circumstances of the humoristic person.

In Victor Hugo’s _Ernani_ the bandit who entered into a conspiracy against his king, Charles I, of Spain, (Charles V, as the German Emperor), falls into the hands of his most powerful enemy; he foresees his fate; as one convicted of high treason his head will fall. But this prospect does not deter him from introducing himself as a hereditary Grandee of Spain and from declaring that he has no intention of waiving any prerogative belonging to such personage. A Grandee of Spain could appear before his royal master with his head covered. Well:

“Nos têtes ont le droit
De tomber couvertes devant de toi.”[81]

This is excellent humor and if we do not laugh on hearing it, it is because our admiration covers the humoristic pleasure. In the case of the rogue who did not wish to take cold on the way to the gallows we roar with laughter. The situation which should have driven this criminal to despair, might have evoked in us intense pity, but this pity is inhibited because we understand that he who is most concerned is quite indifferent to the situation. As a result of this understanding the expenditure for pity, which was already prepared in us, became inapplicable and we laughed it off. The indifference of the rogue, which we notice has cost him a great expenditure of psychic labor, infects us as it were.

Economy of sympathy is one of the most frequent sources of humoristic pleasure. Mark Twain’s humor usually follows this mechanism. When he tells us about the life of his brother, how, as mi employee in a large road-building enterprise, he was hurled into the air through a premature explosion of a blast, to come to earth again far from the place where he was working, feelings of sympathy for this unfortunate are invariably aroused in us. We should like to inquire whether he sustained no injury in this accident; but the continuation of the story that the brother lost a half-day’s pay for being away from the place he worked diverts us entirely from sympathy and makes us almost as hard-hearted as that employer, and just as indifferent to the possible injury to the victim’s health. Another time Mark Twain presents us his pedigree, which he traces back almost as far back as one of the companions of Columbus. But after describing the character of this ancestor, whose entire possessions consisted of several pieces of linen each bearing a different mark, we cannot help laughing at the expense of the stored-up piety, a piety which characterized our frame of mind at the beginning of this family history. The mechanism of humoristic pleasure is not disturbed by our knowing that this family history is a fictitious one, and that this fiction serves a satirical tendency to expose the embellishments which result in imparting such pedigrees to others; it is just as independent of the conditions of reality as the manufactured comic. Another of Mark Twain’s stories relates how his brother constructed for himself subterranean quarters into which he brought a bed, a table, and a lamp, and that as a roof he used a large piece of sail-cloth with a hole through the centre; how during the night after the room was completed, a cow being driven home fell through the opening in the ceiling on to the table and extinguished the lamp; how his brother helped patiently to hoist the animal out and to rearrange everything; how he did the same thing when the same disturbance was repeated the following night; and then every succeeding night; such a story becomes comical through repetition. But Mark Twain closes with the information that in the forty-sixth night when the cow again fell through, his brother finally remarked that the thing was beginning to grow monotonous; and here we can no longer restrain our humoristic pleasure, for we had long expected to hear how the brother would express his anger over this chronic _malheur_. The slight humor which we draw from our own life we usually produce at the expense of anger instead of irritating ourselves.[82]

_Forms of Humor_

The forms of humor are extraordinarily varied according to the nature of the emotional feelings which are economized in favor of humor, as sympathy, anger, pain, compassion, etc. And this series seems incomplete because the sphere of humor experiences a constant enlargement, as often as an artist or writer succeeds in mastering humoristically the, as yet, unconquered emotional feelings and in making them, through artifices similar to those in the above example, a source of humoristic pleasure. Thus the artists of _Simplicissimus_ have worked wonders in gaining humor at the expense of fear and disgust. The manifestations of humor are above all determined by two peculiarities, which are connected with the conditions of its origin. In the first place, humor may appear fused with wit or any other form of the comic; whereby it is entrusted with the task of removing a possible emotional development which would form a hindrance to the pleasurable effect. Secondly, it can entirely set aside this emotional development or only partially, which is really the more frequent case, because the simpler function and the different forms of “broken”[83] humor, results in that humor which smiles under its tears. It withdraws from the affect a part of its energy and gives instead the accompanying humoristic sound.

As may be noticed by former examples the humoristic pleasure gained by entering into sympathy with a thing results from a special technique resembling displacement through which the liberation of affect held ready is disappointed and the energy occupation is deflected to other, and, not often, to secondary matters. This does not help us, however, to understand the process by which the displacement from the development of affect proceeds in the humoristic person himself. We see that the recipient intimates the producer of the humor in his psychic processes, but we discover nothing thereby concerning the forces which make this process possible in the latter.

We can only say, when, for example, somebody succeeds in paying no heed to a painful affect because he holds before himself the greatness of the world’s interest as a contrast to his own smallness, that we see in this no function of humor but one of philosophic thinking, and we gain no pleasure even if we put ourselves into his train of thought. The humoristic displacement is therefore just as impossible in the light of conscious attention as is the comic comparison; like the latter it is connected with the condition to remain in the foreconscious—that is to say, to remain automatic.

One reaches some solution of humoristic displacement if one examines it in the light of a defense process. The defense processes are the psychic correlates of the flight reflex and follow the task of guarding against the origin of pain from inner sources; in fulfilling this task they serve the psychic function as an automatic adjustment, which finally proves harmful and therefore must be subjected to the control of the conscious thinking. A definite form of this defense, the failure of repression, I have demonstrated as the effective mechanism in the origin of the psychoneuroses. Humor can now be conceived as the loftiest variant of this defense activity. It disdains to withdraw from conscious attention the ideas which are connected with the painful affect, as repression does, and thus it overcomes the defense automatism. It brings this about by finding the means to withdraw the energy resulting from the liberation of pain which is held in readiness and through discharge changes the same into pleasure. It is even credible that it is again the connection with the infantile that puts at humor’s disposal the means for this function. Only in childhood did we experience intensively painful affects over which to-day as grown-ups we would laugh; just as a humorist laughs over his present painful affects. The elevation of his ego, of which humoristic displacement gives evidence,—the translation of which would read: I am too big to have these causes affect me painfully—he could find in the comparison of his present ego with his infantile ego. This conception is to some extent confirmed by the rôle which falls to the infantile in the neurotic processes of repression.

_The Relation of Humor to Wit and Comic_

On the whole humor is closer to the comic than wit. Like the former its psychic localization is in the foreconscious, whereas wit, as we had to assume, is formed as a compromise between the unconscious and the foreconscious. On the other hand, humor has no share in the peculiar nature in which wit and the comic meet, a peculiarity which perhaps we have not hitherto emphasized strongly enough. It is a condition for the origin of the comic that we be induced to apply—either _simultaneously_ or in rapid succession—to the same thought function two different modes of ideas, between which the “comparison” then takes place and thus forms the comic difference. Such differences originate between the expenditure of the stranger and one’s own, between the usual expenditure and the emergency expenditure, between an anticipated expenditure and one which has already occurred.[84]

The difference between two forms of conception resulting simultaneously, which work with different expenditures, comes into consideration in wit, in respect to the hearer. The one of these two conceptions, by taking the hints contained in the witticism, follows the train of thought through the unconscious, while the other conception remains on the surface and presents the witticism like any wording from the foreconscious which has become conscious. Perhaps it would not be considered an unjustified statement if we should refer the pleasure of the witticism heard to the difference between these two forms of presentation.

Concerning wit we here repeat our former statement concerning its Janus-like double-facedness, a simile we used when the relation between wit and the comic still appeared to us unsettled.[85]

The character thus put into the foreground becomes indistinct when we deal with humor. To be sure, we feel the humoristic pleasure where an emotional feeling is evaded, which we might have expected as a pleasure usually belonging to the situation; and in so far humor really falls under the broadened conception of the comic of expectation. But in humor it is no longer a question of two different kinds of presentations having the same content; the fact that the situation comes under the domination of a painful emotional feeling which should have been avoided, puts an end to possible comparison with the nature in the comic and in wit. The humoristic displacement is really a case of that different kind of utilization of a freed expenditure which proved to be so dangerous for the comic effect.

_Formulæ for Wit, Comic, and Humor_

Now, that we have reduced the mechanism of humoristic pleasure to a formula analogous to the formula of comic pleasure and of wit, we are at the end of our task. It has seemed to us that the pleasure of wit originates from an _economy of expenditure in inhibition_, of the comic from an _economy of expenditure in thought_, and of humor from an _economy of expenditure in feeling_. All three activities of our psychic apparatus derive pleasure from economy. They all strive to bring back from the psychic activity a pleasure which has really been lost in the development of this activity. For the euphoria which we are thus striving to obtain is nothing but the state of a bygone time in which we were wont to defray our psychic work with slight expenditure. It is the state of our childhood in which we did not know the comic, were incapable of wit, and did not need humor to make us happy.

INDEX

A

Abstract wit, 128

Absurdity, 77

Actuality, 186

Æsthetics, vi

Agassiz, 54

Aggression, 138, 152, 160, 232

Alluring-premiums, 210

Allusions, 107, 108, 232

Ambiguity, 45

Ambitious impulse, 219

Application of same material, 49

Aristotle, 184

Attributions, 121

Automatic process, 238

Automatisms, 85, 86, 87, 235, 358

B

Bain, 226, 322

Bergson, 301, 337, 360

Blasphemous witticisms, 171

Bleuler, 278

_Bonmot_, 43

Brevity, 10, 29, 52, 243

Brill, 22, 31, 35, 37, 38, 56

C

Caricature, 280, 303, 320

Censor, 260

Characterization-wit, 71

Child, 190, 309, 362

Childhood, 149

Comic, 4, 10, 221, 287, 313
element, 88
façade, 236
its origin, 302
its psychogenesis, 360
of expectation, 317
of imitation, 336

Comic, of speech, 345
motion, 304
pleasure, its origin, 351
situations, 303, 314

Comical character, 277

Comparison, 113
with unification, 130

Composition, 31

Condensation, 20, 48
examples of, 21, 22, 23
in dreams, 31, 49, 256
with modification and substitution, 25

Conflict, 163

Contrast, 8

Critical witticisms, 171

Cynical tendency, 204
witticisms and self-criticism, 166

Cynicism, 65, 161
pessimistic, 170

D

Darwin, 226

Defence, 138
reaction, 142

Derision, 157

De Quincey, 22

Disguise, 303

Displacement, 67, 61, 161
in dreams, 256

Displacement-wit, 68, 71, 237

Don Quixote, 377

Double meaning, 40, 103
and displacement, 66
of a name, 41

Doubt in witty comparisons, 118

Dream-formation, 260

Dream-work, 249, 275

Dreams, 30, 250, 251

Dugas, 224, 242

E

Economy, 49, 52, 242, 245
of psychic expenditure, 180

Ehrenfels, 165

Exaggeration, 280

Exhibitionism, 142

F

Façade, 155, 158

Facetious questions, 238

Falke, 14, 80, 95

Falstaff, Sir John, 376

Faulty thinking, 81, 84

Fechner, 188, 207, 280

Fischer, 3, 4, 6, 11, 43, 47, 55, 89, 132, 136

Flaubert, 24

Foreconscious, 282

Fore-pleasure, 209, 211

G

Goethe, 133

Grim-humor, 372

Groos, 183, 184, 185, 195

Gross, 278

H

Harmless wit, 128, 211, 219, 222, 284
and tendency-wit, 130

Heine, 9, 15, 26, 43, 44, 47, 55, 57, 92, 94, 106, 109, 119, 122, 171,
215, 216, 223, 341

Heymans, 9, 215

Holmes, 37

Hugo, 373

Humor, 370
Mark Twain’s, 374

I

Imitations, 303, 322

Impulse to impart wit, 200

Indirect expression, 100
with allusion, 101

Infantile and the comic, 364

Inhibitions, 140, 197, 206, 230, 231, 236, 290
expenditure of, 180

Insults, 209

Invectives, 148, 277

Ironical wit, 100

Irony, 276

J

Jest, 197, 201, 211, 274, 284

Johnson, 45

Jokes, cynical, 164
good or poor, 182
Jewish, 59, 72, 97, 166, 218
smutty, 139, 140, 145, 233

K

Kant, 320

Kleinpaul, 198

Kraepelin, 7

L

Lassalle, 115

Laugh, 221

Laughter as a discharge, 228
its determination, 224, 226

Lessing, 97, 130

Libido, 141

Lichtenberg, 39, 78, 89, 95, 97, 104, 115, 118, 121, 122, 129, 132,
149, 218

Lipps, 3, 4, 6, 10, 30, 93, 215, 227, 254, 320, 326

M

Manifold application, 40, 45

Matthews, 44

Michelet, 78

Modification, 42

Moll, 141

Morality, 163

Motives, 214, 239

N

Naïve, 290
characteristics of, 295
examples of, 291

Negativism, 276

Nestroy, 120, 341

Nonsense, 72, 192, 200, 279

Nonsense-witticisms, 76

O

Obscene wit, 138, 203

Obscenity, 142

Omission, 82, 107, 232

Outdoing wit, 96, 97

P

Parody, 280, 324

Pascal, 337

Paul, 3, 7, 8, 18, 29, 301

Persons in tendency-wit, 144, 221, 222, 230, 231, 240

Perversion, 141

Phillips, 151

Play, 211
and jest, 195
on words, 40

Playing with words, 196

Pleasure in nonsense, 190, 271
mechanisms of wit, 177
sources, 150

Psychic energy, 227

Psychoneuroses, 147

Puns, 53

R

Recognition, 183

Regression, 259

Representation through the opposite, 93, 95
through the minute, 111, 112

Repression, 147, 205, 211

Riddle, 232

Rousseau, J. B., 91

Rousseau, J. J., 33

S

Sancho Panza, 216

Satire, 43, 137

Schnitzler, 42

Sense in nonsense, 73, 74, 75, 199

Sexual elements, 139, 140, 219

Shakespeare, 222

Shake-up rhymes, 129

Sky-larking, 192

Smutty jokes, 139, 145, 233

Society, 150

Sophism, 82, 83, 159

Sophistic displacement, 161
faulty thinking, 78, 79

Soulié, 57

Sound, similarity, 39

Spencer, 225

Spinoza, 106

Stettenheim, 343

Subjective determinations, 155, 156, 166, 215, 217

Substitutive formation, 20

T

Tendencies of wit, 127, 206

Tendency to economy, 49

Tendency-wit, 130
its effect, 210

Thought-wit, 128
its techniques, 154

Travesty, 280, 324

U

Ueberhorst, 91

Unconscious, 254, 255, 269, 279, 281, 329
and the infantile, 268

Unification, 45, 88, 117, 121, 188

Unmasking, 303, 324

V

Vischer, 3, 8, 128

Voltaire, 91

W

Winslow, 45

Wish fulfilment, 249, 253

Wit, 4
and comic, 4, 330
and dreams, 249, 273, 285
and rebellion against authority, 153
as an inspiration, 265
as a social process, 214
by word-division, 32
definitions of, 6, 7, 8
desire to impart it, 239
double-facedness of, 240
harmless, 128
hostile and obscene, 138
in the service of tendencies, 146
ironical, 100
its motives, 214
its subjective determinations, 155
its tendencies, 127

Wit, literature of, 134
outdoing, 96, 97
pleasure mechanisms of, 177, 230
psychogenesis of, 177, 195, 200
shallow, 131
skeptical, 172, 173
technique of, 14, 194, 240

Wit-work, its formula, 261

Witticism and riddle, 232
critical, 171

Witticisms, blasphemous, 171

Witty nonsense, 211, 212

Woman, unyieldingness of, 143

Word-division, 32, 33, 34

Word-pleasure, 190

Word-wit, 128, 131

-----

Footnote 1:

Monograph Series, Journal of Nervous and Mental Diseases Pub. Co., 2nd
Ed., 1912.

Footnote 2:

Monograph Series, Journal of Nervous and Mental Diseases Pub. Co., 2nd
Ed., 1916.

Footnote 3:

The Macmillan Co., New York, and Allen &
Unwin, London.

Footnote 4:

The Macmillan Co., New York, and T. Fisher Unwin, London.

Footnote 5:

This expression is used advisedly in order to distinguish it from
other methods of “analysis,” which Professor Freud fully disavows. Cf.
_The History of the Psychoanalytic Movement_, translated by A. A.
Brill, _The Psychoanalytic Review_, June-Sept., 1916.

Footnote 6:

Cf. the works of Freud, Abraham, Rank, and others.

Footnote 7:

Cf. Freud: _Totem and Taboo_, a translation in preparation, and the
works of Jones, Rank and Sachs, Jung, and Storfer.

Footnote 8:

Cf. Freud, Berny, Rank, and Sachs, and Sperber.

Footnote 9:

Cf. Freud: _Leonardo da Vinci_, a translation in preparation, and the
works of many others.

Footnote 10:

Cf. _v._ Hug-Hellmuth: _Aus dem Seelenleben des Kindes_, and the works
of Jones, Pfister, and many others.

Footnote 11:

Cf. the works of Freud, Putnam, Hitschmann, Winterstein, and others.

Footnote 12:

_Beiträge zur Aesthetik_, edited by Theodor Lipps and Richard Maria
Werner, VI,—a book to which I am indebted for the courage and capacity
to undertake this attempt.

Footnote 13:

J. V. Falke: _Lebenserinnerungen_, 1897.

Footnote 14:

Since this joke will occupy us again and we do not wish to disturb the
discussion following here, we shall find occasion later to point out a
correction in Lipps’s given interpretation which follows our own.

Footnote 15:

The same holds true for Lipps’s interpretation.

Footnote 16:

_Psychanalysis_: Its Theories and Application, 2nd Ed., p. 331.

Footnote 17:

This same witticism was supposed to have been coined before by Heine
concerning Alfred de Musset.

Footnote 18:

One of the complications involved in the technique of this example
lies in the fact that the modification through which the omitted abuse
is substituted is to be taken as an allusion to the latter, for it
leads to it only through a process of deduction.

Footnote 19:

Another factor which I shall mention later on is also effective in the
technique of this witticism. It has to do with the inner character of
the modification (representation through the opposite—contradiction).
The technique of wit does not hesitate to make use simultaneously of
several means, with which, however, we can only become acquainted in
their sequential order.

Footnote 20:

Translation of 4th Ed. by A. A. Brill, the Macmillan Co., New York,
and Allen &
Unwin, London.

Footnote 21:

_The Interpretation of Dreams_, p. 280.

Footnote 22:

Cited by Brill: _Psychanalysis_, p. 335.

Footnote 23:

l. c., p. 334.

Footnote 24:

The excellence of these jokes depends upon the fact that they, at the
same time, present another technical means of a much higher order.

Footnote 25:

Given by Translator.

Footnote 26:

This resembles an excellent joke of Oliver Wendell Holmes cited by
Brill: “Put not your trust in money, but put your money in trust.” A
contradiction is here announced which does not appear. At all events
it is a good example of the untranslatableness of the witticisms of
such technique.

Footnote 27:

Brill cites a very analogous modification wit: _Amantes—Amentes_
(lovers—lunatics).

Footnote 28:

Compare here K. Fischer (p. 85), who applies the term “double meaning”
to those witticisms in which both meanings are not equally prominent,
but where one overshadows the other. I have applied this term
differently. Such a nomenclature is a matter of choice. Usage of
speech has rendered no definite decision about them.

Footnote 29:

L. c., page 339.

Footnote 30:

Heine’s answer is a combination of two wit-techniques—a displacement
and an allusion—for he does not say directly: “He is an ox.”

Footnote 31:

The word “take,” owing to its meanings, lends itself very well towards
the formation of plays upon words, a pure example of which I wish to
cite as a contrast to the displacement mentioned above. While walking
with his friend, in front of a café, a well-known stock-plunger and
bank director made this proposal: “Let us go in and take something.”
His friend held him back and said: “My dear sir, remember there are
people in there.”

Footnote 32:

For the latter see a later chapter. It will perhaps not be superfluous
to add here a few words for better understanding. The displacement
regularly occurs between a statement and an answer, and turns the
stream of thought to a direction different from the one started in the
statement. The justification for separating the displacement from the
double meaning is best seen in the examples where both are combined,
that is, where the wording of the statement admits of a double meaning
which was not intended by the speaker, but which reveals in the answer
the way to the displacement (see examples).

Footnote 33:

See Chapter III.

Footnote 34:

A similar nonsense technique results when the joke aims to maintain a
connection which seems to be removed through the special conditions of
its content. A joke of this sort is related by J. Falke (l. c.): “_Is
this the place where the Duke of Wellington spoke these words?_”
“_Yes, this is the place; but he never spoke these words._”

Footnote 35:

Following an example of the _Greek Anthology_.

Footnote 36:

Cf. my _Interpretation of Dreams_, Chap. VI, _The Dream Work_,
translated by A. A. Brill, The Macmillan Co., New York, and Allen
& Unwin, London.

Footnote 37:

The word tendency encountered hereafter in the expression
“Tendency-Wit” (Tendenz Witz) is used adjectively in the same sense as
in the familiar phrase “Tendency Play.”

Footnote 38:

Cf. my _Psychopathology of Everyday Life_, translated by A. A. Brill,
The Macmillan Co., New York, and T. Fisher Unwin, London.

Footnote 39:

Cf. _Three Contributions to the Theory of Sex_, 2nd Ed., 1916,
translated by A. A. Brill, Monograph Series, _Journal of Nervous and
Mental Diseases_.

Footnote 40:

Moll’s _Kontrektationstrieb_ (Untersuchungen über die Libido
sexualies, 1898).

Footnote 41:

It is the same mechanism that controls “slips of the tongue” and other
phenomena of self-betrayal. Cf. _The Psychopathology of Everyday
Life_.

Footnote 42:

“There is nothing certain about to-morrow,” Lorenzo del Medici.

Footnote 43:

See his essays in the _Politisch-anthropologischen Revue_, II, 1903.

Footnote 44:

An habitual beggar.

Footnote 45:

If I may be permitted to anticipate what later is discussed in the
text I can here throw some light upon the condition which seems to be
authoritative in the usage of language when it is a question of
calling a joke “good” or “poor.” If by means of a double meaning or
slightly modified word I have gotten from one idea to another by a
short route, and if this does not also simultaneously result in
senseful association between the two ideas, then I have made a “poor”
joke. In this poor joke one word or the “point” forms the only
existing association between the two widely separated ideas. The joke
“Home-Roulard” used above is such an example. But a “good” joke
results if the infantile expectation is right in the end and if with
the similarity of the word another essential similarity in meaning is
really simultaneously produced—as in the examples Traduttore—Traditore
(translator—traitor), and Amantes—Amentes (lovers—lunatics). The two
disparate ideas which are here linked by an outer association are held
together besides by a senseful connection which expresses an important
relationship between them. The outer association only replaces the
inner connection; it serves to indicate the latter or to clarify it.
Not only does “translator” sound somewhat similar to “traitor,” but he
is a sort of a traitor whose claims to that name are good. The same
may be said of Amantes—Amentes. Not only do the words bear a
resemblance, but the similarity between “love” and “lunacy” has been
noted from time immemorial.

The distinction made here agrees with the differentiation, to be made
later, between a “witticism” and a “jest.” However, it would not be
correct to exclude examples like Home-Roulard from the discussion of
the nature of wit. As soon as we take into consideration the peculiar
pleasure of wit, we discover that the “poor” witticisms are by no
means poor as witticisms, i.e., they are by no means unsuited for the
production of pleasure.

Footnote 46:

_Die Spiele der Menschen_, 1899, p. 153.

Footnote 47:

_Vorschule der Aesthetik_, 1, XVII.

Footnote 48:

Chapter XVII.

Footnote 49:

Kleinpaul: _Die Rätsel der Sprache_, 1890.

Footnote 50:

_Vorschule der Aesthetik_, Vol. 1, V, p. 51, 2nd Ed., Leipzig, 1897.

Footnote 51:

The nonsense-witticisms, which have been somewhat slighted in this
treatise, deserve a short supplementary comment.

In view of the significance attributed by our conception to the factor
“sense in nonsense,” one might be tempted to demand that every
witticism should be a nonsense-joke. But this is not necessary,
because only the play with thoughts inevitably leads to nonsense,
whereas the other source of wit-pleasure, the play with words, makes
this impression incidental and does not regularly invoke the criticism
connected with it. The double root of wit-pleasure—from the play with
words and thoughts, which corresponds to the most important division
into word- and thought-witticisms—sets its face against a short
formulation of general principles about wit as a tangible aggravation
of difficulties. The play with words produces laughter, as is well
known, in consequence of the factor of recognition described above,
and therefore suffers suppression only in a small degree. The play
with thoughts cannot be motivated through such pleasure: it has
suffered a very energetic suppression and the pleasure which it can
give is only the pleasure of released inhibitions. Accordingly one may
say that wit-pleasure shows a kernel of the original play-pleasure and
a shell of removal-pleasure. Naturally we do not grant that the
pleasure in nonsense-wit is due to the fact that we have succeeded in
making nonsense despite the suppression, while we do notice that the
play with words gives us pleasure. Nonsense, which has remained fixed
in thought-wit, acquires secondarily the function of stimulating our
attention through confusion, it serves as a reinforcement of the
effect of wit, but only when it is insistent, so that the confusion
can anticipate the intellect by a definite fraction of time. That
nonsense in wit may also be employed to represent a judgment contained
within the thought has been demonstrated by the example on p. 73. But
even this is not the primal signification of nonsense in wit.

A series of wit-like productions for which we have no appropriate
name, but which may lay claim to the designation of “witty nonsense,”
may be added to the nonsense-jokes. They are very numerous, but I
shall cite only two examples: As the fish was served to a guest at the
table he put both hands twice into the mayonnaise and then ran them
through his hair. Being looked at by his neighbor with astonishment he
seemed to have noticed his mistake and excused himself, saying:
“Pardon me, I thought it was spinach.”

Or: “Life is like a suspension bridge,” said the one. “How is that?”
asked the other. “How should I know?” was the answer.

These extreme examples produce an effect through the fact that they
give rise to the expectation of wit, so that one makes the effort to
find the hidden sense behind the nonsense. But none is found, they are
really nonsense. Under that deception it was possible for one moment
to liberate the pleasure in nonsense. These witticisms are not
altogether without tendencies, they furnish the narrator a certain
pleasure in that they deceive and annoy the hearer. The latter then
calms his anger by resolving that he himself should take the place of
the narrator.

Footnote 52:

H. Spencer, _The Physiology of Laughter_ (first published in
_Macmillan’s Magazine_ for March, 1860), Essays, Vol. 11, 1901.

Footnote 53:

Different points in this declaration would demand an exhaustive
inquiry into an investigation of the pleasure of the comic, a thing
that other authors have already done, and which, at all events, does
not touch our discussion. It seems to me that Spencer was not happy in
his explanation of why the discharge happens to find just that path,
the excitement of which results in the physical picture of laughter. I
should like to add one single contribution to the subject of the
physiological explanation of laughter, that is, to the derivation or
interpretation of the muscular actions that characterize laughter—a
subject that has been often treated before and since Darwin, but which
has never been conclusively settled. According to the best of my
knowledge the grimaces and contortions of the corners of the mouth
that characterize laughter appear first in the satisfied and satiated
nursling when he drowsily quits the breasts. There it is a correct
motion of expression since it bespeaks the determination to take no
more nourishment, an “enough,” so to speak, or rather a “more than
enough.” This primal sense of pleasurable satiation may have furnished
the smile, which ever remains the basic phenomenon of laughter, the
later connection with the pleasurable processes of discharge.

Footnote 54:

Cf. _The Interpretation of Dreams_, Chap. VII, also _On the Psychic
Force_, etc., in the above cited book of Lipps (p. 123), where he
says: “This is the general principle: The dominant factors of the
psychic life are not represented by the contents of consciousness but
by those psychic processes which are unconscious. The task of
psychology, provided it does not limit itself to a mere description of
the content of consciousness, must also consist of revealing the
nature of these unconscious processes from the nature of the contents
of consciousness and its temporal relationship. Psychology must itself
be a theory of these processes. But such a psychology will soon find
that there exist quite a number of characteristics of these processes
which are unrepresented in the corresponding contents of
consciousness.”

Footnote 55:

Heymans (_Zeitschrift für Psychol._, XI) has taken up the viewpoint of
the nascent state in a somewhat different connection.

Footnote 56: