Joking Asides

The Theory, Analysis, and Aesthetics of Humor

Elliott Oring

• Publisher: Utah State University Press
• Year: 2016
• Print ISBN: 9781607324911
• eBook ISBN: 9781607324928
• Topic: Social Sciences
• Subtopic: Folklore & Mythology
• Index: Social Sciences

Nothing in the understanding of humor is as simple as it might seem. In Joking Asides, Elliott Oring confronts the problems of humor, analyzing the key contemporary approaches to its study and addressing controversial topics with new empirical data and insights.
 
A folklorist drawn to the study of humor, Oring developed his formulation of "appropriate incongruity" as a frame to understand what jokes must do to produce humor. He tests appropriate incongruity against other major positions in the field, including the general theory of verbal humor, conceptual integration theory, benign violation theory, and false-belief theory. Oring draws on the work of scholars from several disciplines—anthropology, folklore, philosophy, psychology, linguistics, and literature—to ask basic questions about the construction and evolution of jokes, untangle the matter of who the actual targets of a joke might be, and characterize the artistic qualities of jokes and joke performances.
 
Although Oring guides the reader through a forest of jokes and joke genres, this is not a joke book. A major work from a major scholar, Joking Asides is a rigorous exploration of theoretical approaches to jokes and their functions and is filled with disquieting questions, penetrating criticisms, and original observations. Written in a clear and accessible style, this book will prove valuable to any scholar or student who takes matters of jokes and joking seriously.

CHAPTER ONE

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What Freud Actually Said about Jokes

A good joke is the one ultimate and sacred thing which cannot be criticised.

—G. K. Chesterton

No scholar who has even the slightest connection to the study of humor can be unaware of Sigmund Freud’s book Jokes and Their Relation to the Unconscious. First published in 1905, the book was revolutionary in its understanding of jokes, the comic, and humor and extended the domain of psychoanalytic theory from symptoms, dreams, and slips of the tongue to the arena of the aesthetic. One has to give some credit to Deuticke, Freud’s publisher, for taking on the project. After all, Deuticke had sold only some 350 copies of The Interpretation of Dreams, published five years earlier (Freud 1960, 8:xx). As it turned out, it would take Deuticke another five years to sell all copies of the first edition of the dream book, and a second edition of the joke book would not appear until seven years after the first.¹

Even though Freud’s book on jokes is widely recognized, it is not necessarily widely read. Yet even those who have never read Freud’s book would probably be able to give a reasonable, if brief, account of Freud’s theory of jokes. Undoubtedly, such accounts would sound very much like what popular writers and scholars present in their own books and essays. Max Eastman, for example: “Witty jokes, like myths and dreams and daydreams, slips and errors, art and poetry, are frequently employed as vehicles of expression by repressed impulses . . . Jests often liberate the surging wishes prisoned in us. They remove our lid of culture, and let us be, in fun at least and for a second, animals” (Eastman 1936, 250–51).² This view is not peculiar to popular writers on humor alone (although I would hesitate to characterize Eastman’s book as merely popular). One can find elements of his view repeated in the works of the most serious and dedicated humor researchers. For example, Joel Sherzer: “Humor and laughter . . . in the case of Freud, [are] an expression of latent, especially sexual repressions and aggressions” (Sherzer 1990, 96); Christopher Wilson: “The joke, then, is assumed to offer pleasure by temporarily reducing the tension of repression; and might also be gratifying in reducing the tension of the impulse itself—‘in allowing unconscious elaboration of a repressed wish’ ” (Wilson 1979, 95); John Morreall: “Joking (like dreaming) serves as a safety valve for forbidden feelings and thoughts, and when we express what is usually inhibited, the energy of repression is released in laughter” (Morreall 1983, 111).

Psychoanalysts characterize Freud’s theory of jokes in a similar fashion. Norman Holland: “Freud’s recognition of the similarity and style between jokes and dreams (and, to a lesser extent, symptoms and slips of the tongue) meant that he could establish a relation between funniness and unconscious mental processes generally . . . A joke allows the id’s impulses to thread their way through the ego’s defenses” (Holland 1982, 47, 52); Martin Grotjahn: “According to Freud, laughter occurs when psychic energy is stimulated, then temporarily repressed, and finally freely and suddenly released without guilt or conflict . . . An aggressive intent must be stimulated, then repressed from consciousness into the unconscious; there it must be carefully disguised by the work of the unconscious censorship and finally allowed to emerge again—now in the disguise of a joke which expresses the hostile aggressive intent successfully . . . The dream symbolizes and fulfills symbolically a wish; wit expresses an aggressive trend in disguise” (Grotjahn 1970,162). And finally, Alan Dundes: “One element of emotional maturity is the ability to accept restrictions on pleasure-seeking (id) drives and to redirect the energies into secondary gratifications (sublimation). These energies must find some secondary outlet. One most effective substitute gratification is wit, especially as an aggressive expression . . . Even the spoken aggression may be further ameliorated by being couched in symbolic terms” (Dundes 1987, 42, 44).

One could cite many other examples (Schaeffer 1981, 12; Neve 1988, 37; Nilsen 1988, 344; Ziv and Gadish 1990, 248; Norrick 2001, 205; Lefcourt 2001, 36, 39; Billig 2005, 151). It should also be noted that these quotations have been lifted from more detailed descriptions of Freud’s work in which nuances, complications, and ramifications are discussed at greater length and in greater depth. Nevertheless, I would contend that these descriptions of Freud’s theory of jokes are representative and correct in their essentials. Jokes are like dreams and slips of the tongue. They all allow for the expression of thoughts repressed in the unconscious, and their articulation in jokes serves as a kind of release and relief necessary for both the psychological and physiological functioning of the individual (Keith-Spiegel 1972, 20–21; Goldstein, Suls, and Anthony 1972, 160; Rothbart 1977, 90; Charney 1983, 2:111; Apter 1982, 191; Morreall 1983, 28; Ziv 1984, 20, 48; Morreall 1987, 111; Dundes 1987, 44; Haig 1988, 23; Wyer and Collins 1992, 664; Davis 1993, 7, 81; L. Rappaport 2005, 19–20; Billig 2005, 169–71; Morreall 2008, 222–24; Kuipers 2008, 362; Hurley, Dennett, and Adams 2011, 44).³

But to what extent are jokes like dreams? In Freud’s view, dreams are wish fulfillments. The wishes they fulfill are those which have been repressed—have been made inaccessible to consciousness—and that would greatly disturb the dreamer were they to become conscious. These wishes—the latent thoughts underlying the dream—are disguised in the language of the dream. This language utilizes a set of transformational rules that make the dream thoughts unrecognizable: condensation, displacement, pictorial representation, and secondary revision.⁴ Freud calls these transformations the “dream-work,” the work that the psyche must do to convert the unconscious thoughts into a dream. Were the latent dream thoughts—which are largely sexual and aggressive in nature—recognizable to the dreamer, they would disturb sleep. In the dream, however, the wishes are fulfilled while remaining unrecognizable. The function of the dream, in Freud’s view, is to fulfill these wishes in order to preserve sleep (Freud 1953, 5:644, 678).

In Jokes and Their Relation to the Unconscious, Freud first attempts to unravel the techniques of jokes. He distinguishes between the joke envelope (witzige Einkleidung, actually “joking costume”) and the joke thought (Gedankenwitz). The envelope is what makes a thought a joke. It is the product of joke techniques. To understand the techniques of a joke one must engage in the joke’s reduction, a process that gets rid of the joke by minimally changing its mode of expression but retaining its underlying thought. For example, Freud reduces the following witticism by Felix Unger, professor of jurisprudence and president of the Supreme Court, to its underlying thought. “I drove with him tête-à-bête.” Tête means “head,” tête-à-tête means “in private conversation,” and bête means “beast” or “brute” in French. The joke means, “I drove with X tête-à-tête, and X is a stupid ass.” The joke depends upon the change of the initial phoneme in tête to the one in bête. Freud describes the technique of this joke as “condensation accompanied by slight modification” (Freud 1960, 8:23–25, 93). Condensation, however, is also one of the operations of the dream-work. Freud goes on to identify other joke techniques—displacement, indirect representation, allusion, unification, faulty reasoning, absurdity, representation by the opposite—all of which are cognates or subcategories of mechanisms of the dream-work. Freud, in fact, calls the techniques that transform a thought into a joke the joke-work, based on his previous analysis of dreams (8:54). For Freud, there is a significant correspondence between jokes and dreams.

In 1899, when Freud’s friend Wilhelm Fliess was reading page proofs of The Interpretation of Dreams, he commented that the dream examples that were analyzed seemed too full of jokes. Freud responded: “All dreamers are insufferably witty, and they have to be, because they are under pressure, and the direct way is barred to them. If you think so, I shall insert a remark to that effect somewhere. The ostensible wit of all unconscious processes is closely connected with the theory of jokes and humour” (Freud 1954, 297). It is unlikely, however, that Fliess’s comment first awakened Freud to the analogy between dreams and jokes. First, Freud’s response to Fliess’s observation seems fully formed and the result of previous reflection rather than off the cuff. Second, two years before, in June 1897, when Freud was deep in the analysis of his own dreams, he wrote to Fliess that he had “recently made a collection of significant Jewish stories [jokes]” (211). Third, in a footnote in Studies on Hysteria, first published in 1895, Freud comments on the analysis of a patient’s hallucinations. Although he did not explicitly label them “jokes,” he remarked nevertheless that they “called for much ingenuity” (Freud 1955, 2:181n1).

The distinction between the joke thought and the joke envelope is an important one for Freud, although it is rarely emphasized in reviews of and commentaries on his work (but see Billig 2005, 155). In his book, Freud distinguishes other aspects of jokes as well. He notes the difference between “verbal jokes” and “conceptual jokes,” that is, between jokes that rely on their linguistic formulation and those that are independent of such formulations (Freud 1960, 8:91). Freud also distinguishes between “innocent jokes” and “tendentious jokes” (8:90–91). The innocent joke is an end in itself and serves no other particular aim. Innocent jokes, however, are not necessarily trivial or lacking in substance. They may actually convey a significant thought. What defines the innocent joke is that it is not tendentious. The pleasure it produces is purely aesthetic and fulfills no other aim in life. The tendentious joke, however, serves purposes beyond entertainment that are inaccessible to t...

Table of contents

• Cover
• Title Page
• Copyright
• Contents
• Preface
• 1 What Freud Actually Said about Jokes
• 2 Parsing the Joke: The General Theory of Verbal Humor and Appropriate Incongruity
• 3 Blending and Humor
• 4 On Benign Violations
• 5 Humor and the Discovery of False Beliefs
• 6 Framing Borat
• 7 Risky Business: Political Jokes under Repressive Regimes
• 8 Listing toward Lists: Jokes on the Internet
• 9 What Is a Narrative Joke?
• 10 Demythologizing the Jewish Joke
• 11 From the Ridiculous to the Sublime: Jokes and Art
• 12 Contested Performance and Joke Aesthetics
• Afterword
• Notes
• Works Cited
• About the Author
• Index