Engaging Humor

3. Joke Thoughts

3. Joke Thoughts No figure looms larger in the modern history of symbolism than Sigmund Freud. It was Freud who made symbolism a primary concern of the human sciences in the twentieth century and utterly transformed the conceptualization of human behaviors. After Freud, dreams, nervous diseases, slips of the tongue, rituals, superstitions, myths, folktales, and customs were not the same phenomena they had been before. Even those who have attempted to revise or have opposed Freud’s symbolic approach are to a great extent defined by his project.1 It should be,therefore,of some interest to note that Freud’s most sustained analysis of a literary genre, Jokes and Their Relation to the Unconscious, is decidedly unsymbolic. This monograph, which profoundly affected the understanding of jokes in the twentieth century among scholars and laymen alike, thoroughly abstains from using symbolism in deciphering the meanings of jokes. In jokes, rings remain rings, knives remain knives, umbrellas remain umbrellas, and ghosts remain ghosts.2 This literalism seems doubly perplexing given that Freud’s central argument is that there is a deep analogy between jokes and dreams. Yet for Freud, dreams were the royal road to the unconscious and the most symbolic form of imaginative expression. There are two reasons for the absence of a symbolic approach in Freud’s analysis of jokes. First, Jokes and Their Relation to the Unconscious was published in 1905,which was some years before Freud fully articulated his notion of symbolism.Freud’s notion of those fixed and widely shared representations of the human body,sexual activity,family,birth,death,and nakedness3 —what have come to be known as “Freudian symbols”4 —crystallized only some years after the publication of his work on jokes.5 28 engaging humor There is a second and deeper reason why Freud’s analysis of jokes avoids symbolic interpretation. For Freud, jokes are two-dimensional expressions. On the one hand, there is a joking envelope that constitutes the form of expression . This form is a consequence of technique. Undo the technical apparatus of a joke, and a joke is no longer in evidence. But a joke is not merely technique. When the technique is undone, what remains is a thought. Technique is what transforms a thought into a joke. Freud devotes a significant part of his monograph to analyzing the techniques of jokes. He felt that the techniques of jokes could be conceptualized in terms of three major mechanisms :condensation,displacement,and indirect representation,the very same mechanisms that he held responsible for the production of dreams.6 A dream is a jumble of visual,verbal,and other impressions that make little sense to a dreamer.In The Interpretation of Dreams, Freud claims to show that the bizarre and puzzling content of the dream makes sense in relation to thoughts underlying the dream. These latent thoughts, however, are alien to the consciousness of the dreamer. Their expression is so transformed by the “dreamwork”—the mechanisms of condensation, displacement, and indirect representation—that they are unrecognizable.7 The thoughts underlying jokes are also given over to the unconscious, where they are reshaped by the very same mechanisms that shape dreams. Unlike dreams, however, the thoughts underlying jokes are completely accessible to consciousness. They merely acquire their distinctive form by virtue of their detour through the unconscious. While dreams and jokes are similar in that they are both shaped by the mechanisms of condensation,displacement,and indirect representation,they differ in fundamental ways. Dreams are completely asocial and have nothing to communicate. They do not even make sense to the dreamer. Jokes, however, are among the most social forms of expression. They demand to be communicated. Consequently, jokes must satisfy a requisite condition of intelligibility. When the thought underlying a joke undergoes transformation in the unconscious, it may be distorted only up to the point that it can be reclaimed by conscious understanding.8 Thus jokes, in the psychoanalytic view, do not express unconscious ideas in disguised form; rather, they express perfectly conscious ideas in distorted form.9 Moreover, the distortion is reversible and the original thought completely recoverable.10 In the broad psychoanalytic sense,a symbol is any word, action,or image that represents an unconscious thought.11 In this sense,jokes are not symbolic, and consequently, Freud makes no use of symbolic interpretation in their analysis. Jokes and Their Relation to the Unconscious contains any number of inter- [18.224.33.107] Project MUSE (2024-04-26 07:42...