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The Joke and Its Relation to the Unconscious

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First published in 1999. Routledge is an imprint of Taylor & Francis, an informa company.

229 pages, Paperback

First published January 1, 1905

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About the author

Sigmund Freud

3,371 books7,508 followers
Dr. Sigismund Freud (later changed to Sigmund) was a neurologist and the founder of psychoanalysis, who created an entirely new approach to the understanding of the human personality. He is regarded as one of the most influential—and controversial—minds of the 20th century.

In 1873, Freud began to study medicine at the University of Vienna. After graduating, he worked at the Vienna General Hospital. He collaborated with Josef Breuer in treating hysteria by the recall of painful experiences under hypnosis. In 1885, Freud went to Paris as a student of the neurologist Jean Charcot. On his return to Vienna the following year, Freud set up in private practice, specialising in nervous and brain disorders. The same year he married Martha Bernays, with whom he had six children.

Freud developed the theory that humans have an unconscious in which sexual and aggressive impulses are in perpetual conflict for supremacy with the defences against them. In 1897, he began an intensive analysis of himself. In 1900, his major work 'The Interpretation of Dreams' was published in which Freud analysed dreams in terms of unconscious desires and experiences.

In 1902, Freud was appointed Professor of Neuropathology at the University of Vienna, a post he held until 1938. Although the medical establishment disagreed with many of his theories, a group of pupils and followers began to gather around Freud. In 1910, the International Psychoanalytic Association was founded with Carl Jung, a close associate of Freud's, as the president. Jung later broke with Freud and developed his own theories.

After World War One, Freud spent less time in clinical observation and concentrated on the application of his theories to history, art, literature and anthropology. In 1923, he published 'The Ego and the Id', which suggested a new structural model of the mind, divided into the 'id, the 'ego' and the 'superego'.

In 1933, the Nazis publicly burnt a number of Freud's books. In 1938, shortly after the Nazis annexed Austria, Freud left Vienna for London with his wife and daughter Anna.

Freud had been diagnosed with cancer of the jaw in 1923, and underwent more than 30 operations. He died of cancer on 23 September 1939.

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Displaying 1 - 30 of 90 reviews
Profile Image for Vik.
292 reviews358 followers
September 24, 2016
Brilliantly funny and fantastically refreshing. Few of my favorites jokes from the book:

First, a marriage-broker was defending the girl he had proposed against the young man’s protests.
"I don’t care for the mother-in-law", said the latter. She’s a disagreeable, stupid person. But after all you’re not marrying the mother-in-law. What you want is her daughter."

"Yes, but she’s not young any longer, and she’s not precisely a beauty."

"No matter. If she’s neither young nor beautiful she’ll be all the more faithful to you."

"But she hasn’t much money."

"Who’s talking about money? Are you marrying money then? After all it’s a wife that you want."

"But she’s got a hunchback too."

"Well, what do you want? Isn’t she to have a single fault?"'

Second, 'The bridegroom was most disagreeably surprised when the bride was introduced to him, and drew the broker on one side and whispered his remonstrances: "Why have you brought me here?" he asked reproachfully. "She’s ugly and old, she squints and has bad teeth and bleary eyes . . ." - "You needn’t lower your voice", interrupted the broker, "she’s deaf as well."'

Third, 'The Schadchen had assured the suitor that the girl’s father was no longer living. After the betrothal it emerged that the father was still alive and was serving a prison sentence. The suitor protested to the Schadchen, who replied: "Well, what did I tell you? You surely don’t call that living?"'

Fourth, ‘The would-be bridegroom complained that the bride had one leg shorter than the other and limped. The Schadchen contradicted him: "You’re wrong. Suppose you marry a woman with healthy, straight limbs! What do you gain from it? You never have a day’s security that she won’t fall down, break a leg and afterwards be lame all her life. And think of the suffering then, the agitation, and the doctor’s bill! But if you take this one, that can’t happen to you. Here you have a fait accompli.’

Fifth, ‘The bridegroom was paying his first visit to the bride’s house in the company of the broker, and while they were waiting in the salon for the family to appear, the broker drew attention to a cupboard with glass doors in which the finest set of silver plate was exhibited. "There! Look at that! You can see from these things how rich these people are." - "But", asked the suspicious young man, "mightn’t it be possible that these fine things were only collected for the occasion - that they were borrowed to give an impression of wealth?" – He replied, "Who do you think would lend these people anything?"'

Sixth, a Marxist joke, It is instructive to compare this joke with another that is very close to it in meaning: ‘A man who had taken to drink supported himself by tutoring in a small town. His vice gradually became known, however, and as a result he lost most of his pupils. A friend was commissioned to urge him to mend his ways. "Look, you could get the best tutoring in the town if you would give up drinking. So do give it up!" "Who do you think you are?" was the indignant reply. "I do tutoring so that I can drink. Am I to give up drinking so that I can get tutoring?"'

Seventh, on capitalism, 'A horse-dealer was recommending a saddle-horse to a customer. "If you take this horse and get on it at four in the morning you’ll be at Pressburg by half-past six." - "What should I be doing in Pressburg at halfpast six in the morning?"'

And few more gags on political economy, where is the economy hidden in such jokes as ‘Rousseau - roux et sot’ or ‘Antigone - antik? oh nee’.

‘An impoverished individual borrowed 25 florins from a prosperous acquaintance, with many asseverations of his necessitous circumstances. The very same day his benefactor met him again in a restaurant with a plate of salmon mayonnaise in front of him. The benefactor reproached him: "What? You borrow money from me and then order yourself salmon mayonnaise? Is that what you’ve used my money for?" "I don’t understand you", replied the object of the attack; "if I haven’t any money I can’t eat salmon mayonnaise, and if I have some money I mustn’t eat salmon mayonnaise. Well, then, when am I to eat salmon mayonnaise?"'

It could as well be possible that Ludwig Wittgenstein must have Freud (this book) in mind when he famously put, "A serious and good philosophical work could be written consisting entirely of jokes."

Profile Image for Μαρία Γεωργιάδου.
173 reviews46 followers
May 8, 2016
Ένα βιβλίο 334 σελίδων που -παρά τα φαινόμενα- διαβάζεται τρομερά εύκολα. Δεν είχα ξαναδιαβάσει Freud και εξεπλάγην με την απλότητα και τη σαφήνεια της γραφής του. Το βιβλίο χωρίζεται σε τρία μέρη των οποίων η δυσκολία αυξάνει (ελαφρώς) σταδιακά, κάτι που όμως εξισορροπείται από το γεγονός ότι ο συγγραφέας δεν θεωρεί τίποτα αυτονόητο. Βέβαια η ανάγνωση του βιβλίου μπορεί να έχει και παρενέργειες: Ομολογώ πως τις τελευταίες μέρες, όταν ακούω κάποιο αστείο, πιάνω τον εαυτό μου να σκέφτεται αν είναι ευφυολόγημα ή απλώς λογοπαίγνιο, αν είναι «αθώο» ή «στοχευμένο» κοκ.
Profile Image for Sajid.
443 reviews90 followers
September 25, 2021
Freud at his best
This book is one of Freud's more accessible forays into culture and the psychologies of social life, with less investment in the psychoanalytic process as a form of therapy than some of his other books, and fewer discussions of doctor-patient relationships; but such topics are never far from his mind. What do we learn about people from the jokes they tell? Why do we joke? Why does laughter seem involuntary? Why is something so common and universal so difficult to explain? These are some of the questions Freud tackles. His idea that jokes package a tremendous amount of hostility was not new nor was the idea that joking is an emotional catharsis (and Freud duly acknowledges his sources). But, in a structuralist move par excellence, he explores how the semantic forms of joking relate to psychological forms: the brevity, the word play, the grammatical and semantic relations.

It is unfortunate that critics of Freud so rarely offer as considered an account of his work as the one he offers of general theories of comedy at the outset of Jokes and Their Relation to the Unconscious. The first few pages are a concise, astute, and accurate synopsis of the theories of comedy. Some of his own ideas, such as the way he maps economies onto our psyche, may seem awkward, but they are worth considering and this is one book where his novel ideas about comedy are, if not impossible to prove or disprove, also worth considering. Freud proposes a number of theoretical approaches to understanding jokes and wit, built up around the idea that joking is not just about laughter replacing anxiety and fear but is also a way of expressing unconscious thoughts related to maturity, social control, sexuality and aggression in daily life, all of which takes place in a public and social milieu.

His work very much bridges older theories of joking, such as a Hobbesian superiority or catharsis, with social and anthropological theories, such as Henri Bergson's or Mary Douglas's. Those who offer a synopsis of Freud's thinking about jokes based on one theory - e.g., that he thinks that jokes emerge from an unconscious aggression as a way of bypassing the internal censor - have not familiarized themselves with the many different approaches Freud takes in this book, and the way in which he openly struggles with the nebulous terrain of comedy and how science might approach this psychological, social, cognitive and cultural phenomenon.
Profile Image for Michael.
57 reviews70 followers
March 14, 2014
2.5 stars.
When the introducer in his introduction writes something like, “Besides, readers of his [Freud’s] Joke book who have been uneasily conscious of the persistent failures of understanding prompted by such mismatches are entitled to know that their stupidity is not to blame (or at any rate is shared by a fellow-reader). In reality, as we have seen, a factor that obstructs any easy understanding of the text is that the terms evolved by Freud in his analysis of dreams cannot have the same meaning when applied to jokes. But he writes as if they can.” the reader knows she may be in trouble, and if she choses to proceed, perhaps her stupidity will not, in this instance, be so pardonable.

If this book was a joke–and in a few but rather unfunny and yet major ways it is–its punchline would be (you might have guessed): ‘your mother’s vagina’; and if Freud could just be so concise, he’d have himself a joke that might elicit a laugh–that is the out-loud kind everyone is talking about these days–from which the reader could better follow his explication. As it is, the enterprise suffers from a few critical issues: the translation of jokes across languages, the translation of jokes across cultures, and the translation of jokes across time. Add to that what is Freud’s (likely) pedestrian sense of humor and you have yourself a rather tedious read hidden behind the promise of an interesting, if not enlightening, philosophical investigation; it is at best a biographical and historical window into the author himself.

As I began to suggest, it is because few if any of the book’s jokes are actually funny that book’s treatise is, from the beginning, severed from the only interesting question: ‘Why do we laugh?’ or ‘Just what sort of phenomena is laughter?’ At one point–and one that I suspect Freud is not being so humble as he might sound–the author admits: “we do not in the strict sense know what we are laughing at.” But he continually does a rather unsatisfactory job of expounding this. The reader might learn some psychological motivations that certain kinds of jokes perhaps condemn their tellers to, but will likely be disappointed if looking for a deeper understanding of how and why the human animal becomes victim to what Wikipedia describes as the involuntary, physical reaction, consisting typically of rhythmical, often audible contractions of the diaphragm and other parts of the respiratory system.

Freud intermittently suggests a sort of energetic economy as the basis of ‘funniness’ but as soon as this seems an interesting inroad, his own tendency to speak presumptively and authoritatively where he has earned little right to do so, gets in the way. He often speaks to the reader as if she is already on board, “we can only surmise that…”, “we have now learned…” etc. And when he says things like: “I have not come up against anything that would have required me to alter or improve my line of thought, so I can wait quietly until my readers’ understanding has caught up with me, or at least until intelligent criticism has proved to me the fundamental errors of my view.” it seems that he cares less about being right than he does about being ahead.

Regrettable, and unless you’re a Freud scholar/enthusiast, forgettable.
Profile Image for Jeremy.
907 reviews51 followers
December 1, 2012
Nothing is worse than having someone explain a joke to you.

Now imagine having arcane jokes explained to you by an Austrian Psychoanalyst who grew up in the Victorian era for 300 pages or so.

Somehow it burrows its way so far into unbearable tedium, that it digs right through to the other side into being funny.

Still, it's a little painful to read sometimes.

Profile Image for Adam.
415 reviews153 followers
May 24, 2019
"Humor is like a frog: if you dissect it, it dies." -Mark Twain

Freud did, and it does. He commenced under the sway of two truths which are just about all one retains from the reading: first, that he was on to something, and second, that he had no idea what he was talking about. They don't cancel or balance out, they persist in dissonance. No matter how forced are Freud's efforts, the Introduction by John Carey is insufferable. Omit without remorse. The translator's preface sheds a little light without attempting to overshadow. Unlike its nobler sibling Die Traumdeutung, Freud never returned to revise his Witz, which is a shame because it could certainly benefit from being disencumbered of his early economic/vulgar materialist rhetoric of discharges and expenditures. Despite the overall tendentious determination to strongarm everything to fit within the model of psychical savings (the sole point blunted in pointless Introduction), Freud can't seem to resist the occasional flourish and keen observation in this least fun book about being funny. As long as you prepare for a slough through the desert, you can appreciate the trickling oases.

"This book effectively ends with a chapter on the comic in which it
is striking to see Freud suddenly miles below his usual perspicacity, so much so that the question is rather why he says nothing more than the worst of authors focused on the most elementary notion of the comic and why in some ways he refused to do more. This will no doubt make us more indulgent towards our psychoanalytic colleagues who also lack a sense of the comic, to the point where it seems to be ruled out for anyone exercising the profession." -Lacan, S.V, 109/99
Profile Image for Ameera H.  Al-mousa.
70 reviews200 followers
July 20, 2011
النكتة وعلاقتها باللاشعور – عنوان مثير ولافت للانتباه
! في وقت يثير إستغرابي رجل دائم السخرية
! وامرأة آخرى دائمة البحث والتنقل بين النكت بجميع أنواعها
! وشعب من سماته تداول النكت حتى عبر التقنية
! انتهاء بصديقاتي من مصر بارعات في حياكة النكتة وصياغتها

دراسة فريدة من نوعها في هذا الكتاب دراسة طابع السخرية والدعابة والضحك من منحى سيكولوجي عميق والكشف عن أغوار مسببات النكتة وأنواعها يبدأ فرويد مؤلفه بتساؤل * لماذا نضحك ؟ ويجيب بتوضيح رؤيته بأن الضحك كالأحلام في علاقتها باللاواعي فالضحك وطابعة التنكيت يُرضى اللاواعي عن طريق تبديد وتفريغ الممنوعات عن طريق البوح بالنكتة بما في الداخل للوصول لمبدأ اللذة أو المتعة * | خصوصاً الرغبات والغرائز الجنسية والقمع الديني والاستبداد السلطوي والطبقية والتمييز بين الجنسين والعنصرية والعدوانية وغيرها

أحببت تحليل فرويد لبعض نصوص النكت الدينية اليهودية والمقولات الساخرة في الأدبيات حول السلطة , والمفارقات بين الساخر وجمهور النكتة المستمعين
في احد الفصول تناول تحليل بُنية النكتة وطابع اللذة فيها - فيرى فرويد أن الحصول على تلك اللذة من توفير الطاقة النفسية لدى الفرد فيتم التعبير عن مشاعره الخطيرة، والعداء السخرية، والعدوان، أو الجنس ، وتجاوز الرقابة الداخلية والخارجية عنه ويتمتع بالتالي بشعور التنفيس العاطفي
كما يرى مصادر أخرى محتملة للمتعة، بما في ذلك الاعتراف ، والتذكر ، وتخفيف من حدة التوتر ، ولذة من الهراء واللعب والكذب ثم يرى في نكتة واحده من شأنها أن تنقد فعل أو سلوك منسيّ ، فتتحول النكات ل"عملية اجتماعية"، مع الاعتراف بأن النكات قد يكشف المزيد عن الحياة الاجتماعية في وقت معين من شعب معين، فهو يحول هذا إلى التحقيق في السبب الذي جعل الناس نكتة معا، وتوسيع وجهات نظره على نفسية اقتصادية مع مناقشات التماسك الاجتماعي والعدوان الاجتماعي والسياسي
كما يقترح عددا من المناهج النظرية لفهم النكات والطرافة ، تدور حول فكرة أن المزاح ليس فقط تعبيراً للقلق والخوف عن طريق الضحك ولكن هو أيضا وسيلة للتعبير عن الأفكار المتصلة باللاوعي ، والنضج الجنسي ، والرقابة الاجتماعية في السلطة اليومية للحياة


مُلاحظة *
واجهة صعوبة في بعض الترجمة , خصوصاً في تحليل النصوص الأدبية التى حللها فرويد

ولا أعلم و-يؤسفني - لما لمَ يُلاقي هذا المؤلف إهتمام من قبل الباحثين العرب قليل منهم اكتفى بأخذ تفسيرات منه ولم يحضى بالترجمة للغة العربية

Profile Image for Christopher Gontar.
17 reviews8 followers
February 6, 2021
This book is about several traditional types of meaning-based jokes. It was Freud's earliest attempt to publish a book on his theory of the unconscious, and one Freudian scholar (Tomas Geyskens) even believes, unrealistically, that this text is the best example of Freud's theory of sublimation in art.

Every basic class of jokes is included here, although not properly identified according to their actual type. Freud even includes a sophisticated kind in which ambiguous language is used as a means of indirect communication. But these indirection jokes, like all others, are analyzed by theorists today as "incongruity resolution." According to this erroneous view humor lies in our mere satisfaction in discovering just what is going on in a joke, in particular as it "resolves," partially or fully. That theory holds that what is mainly funny is the process itself of getting the joke. This is a false theory that certainly must be abandoned, especially considering the better alternative that I have devised.

There are in fact two classes of linguistic jokes, which the authoritative theorists lump together as one. One is merely a glorified pun or witticism, while that which thinly veils a foible in double meaning, should be known as an indirection, or "irony" joke. Freud illustrates the joke of indirection in the example about the doctor, in that passage where he explains "double meaning proper." That notion describes well the kind of ambiguity that is used both in indirect communication and in a glorified witticism.

But he also discloses, unknowingly, a third class, citing the one about a foolish café customer who hasn't paid his bill and tries to return a piece of cake to pay for his drink because he "hadn't eaten" the cake. This kind of joke is neither irony nor glorified or expanded witticism, since it directly presents self-deception -- and as that theme appears in stories like those by Isaac Bashevis Singer -- not by allusion as in most jokes.

Freud cannot explain jokes well even on a superficial level. Nevertheless, his main joke theory is clear and almost identical to the "incongruity resolution" theory. He proposes that what makes most jokes funny is that they embed an irrational discourse, lingering from childhood interest, within a rational, mature-minded framework, so that their ultimate outcome is more or less half sense and half nonsense. This view does have general applicability in that the embedding applies both to jokes that end with an assertion that requires decoding (as in indirection), or a locution that helps to partially decode what came before (thus a glorified witticism). Although Freud makes no strong connection between jokes' formal attributes and Jewish culture, one of the stories from Tales of Sendebar, a medieval romance text, turns on equivocation. That suggests such meaning-hinged comedies were prototypical jokes. A central version of Sendebar is the Hebrew one, implying that the modern ambiguity-based joke might, or should have evolved from stories such as this. The "nobody" episode in Homer's Odyssey is another example.

While this book does not include many one-liners, it makes careful note of the "tendentious" humor that such shorter jokes often exhibit. Freud mentions a quip spoken by Heinrich Heine that might be considered a one-liner, but he doesn't understand the humor in what Heine says.

Freud's examples feature salient double meanings, which he both fails to notice and to interpret as to their humorous force in general. What is the humor in double meaning? Freud should know, since it relates to his own psychology, but he doesn't have a clue. That is ironic, and the major oversight. Nevertheless -- while Freud denied it -- all such things can be explained on only one theory.

Freud's psychology would have been ideal for a theory of humor, since an adjustment to reality defines the growth of the psyche. What could be more perfect than a humor theory based on the science of accepting reality and dealing with existence? In other words, humor is always an allusion to a flight from reality, and all of psychoanalysis is centered around this idea. Although he does appear to have noticed this in the case of humor, he did not know how to develop or explain it. Now this difficulty of Freud's is related to the fact that he did not understand the actual meaning of desire, but that is a different topic.

Lost in the subtlety of jokes, Freud was not able to find a way to link his psychoanalysis with humor. This resulted in his erroneous view that jokes are a throwback to childhood nonsense and word games. Many claim that his examples are obscured by barriers of culture and language, yet this is unimportant. It's not that Freud's jokes are bad (though perhaps they are not great), but he did not understand them. Translation is never a major issue in Freud's ideas here.

Consider that, if he were right, then jokes would be no more funny than Spoonerisms. And when Freud tries to hijack all of the terms of humor theory one by one, "humor," "comedy," "wit" and "jokes" and assign unfounded meanings to them he is quite mistaken. That is just one of this book's several outrageous moves.

Note, however, that Freud is not wrong to imply as he does a connection between the uncertainty of mental development and stability, and jokes. He acknowledges this relationship by taking the illogical, frivolous and nonsensical as rebellion against mature reason. Freud is still rather far from the truth though he implies that jokes are allusive, or in other words that they are partial rebellions against reason and not complete ones. He seems to realize that they don't explicitly present the source of their power.

But Freud misses the precise sort of transgression that jokes vaguely reference. It is not a crucial matter, moreover, whether they violate meaning or logic. In either of those cases, they support only a "selfish self-deception" theory of humor, the theory that comical folly is a kind of diminutive ambition.

Jokes and comedy often express rebellion against the intended meanings that people impose. There is an old humor concept, mainly Jewish, in which one or more characters equivocate between the use, ownership or the possession of a thing. This happens in Isaac Bashevis Singer's story of Schlemiel and his wife passing the coin between them as a series of payments. Precisely the same theme appears in Freud's joke about the cake, not paid for, being returned for exchange. The intention of others is the reality of meaning that irritates the self-centered psyche. All gaffes are mistakes of meaning or of the recognition of other people and the real world. That is the essence of what a gaffe is at least as we are evolved to interpret it emotionally, through humor -- even though our sense of humor exaggerates the degree of blame, as we pounce on more involuntary errors and treat them as though they were literally comical.

Thus the humorous meaning of all jokes, which are just allusively imbedded gaffes, consists in selfish self-deception. They refer to the idea of a disregard for meaning as determined by context and other people.

One commenter to this review asks me to provide more of the evidence against Freud that I claim to have. He said, either tell me why Freud is generally wrong about humor or show how he failed to understand a few jokes. I think that what I just said above fulfills the first part of the request sufficiently. But the latter request is also basically already fulfilled. I'm not going to publish my analyses of Freud's jokes in this review. That's asking way too much.

Just go to my review of Noel Carroll's short introduction book on humor and you see the same Freudian pattern of jokes refuted. What you see there is essentially what I say about the jokes in Freud's book and his interpretation of them.

But the simple proof is that jokes are not funny on the basis of their resemblance or allusion to childhood word games. Punch lines don't merely fail to follow logically, but they involve double meaning. Freud doesn't explain the prevalence of double meaning, but he cannot because he doesn't know it's there half the time -- he misses it in several examples.

Sure, it may be difficult to explain such jokes properly and I have become skilled at it as the result of several years of intense research and thinking. I certainly was not good at it overnight or had no natural talent.

There is not a single section or argument in the book that follows logically or conforms to human experience. If anyone thought otherwise, a debate would be arranged to defend such a view. That isn't happening, and this smug silence only reflects the inability of defenders of this material to face reality. If society and academe were truly rational (obviously they're not), it would be only a matter of time before this insignificant garbage were removed from the intellectual landscape, ceasing to confuse, intimidate and mentally impoverish thousands of innocent readers. It is tragic that my own words are taken as the aggressive and tyrannical, when they are liberating.

Certain books are preserved because of who wrote them, and because they stand as landmarks along a course toward a better view. This is one of them. An honest and clear evaluation of Freud's view of jokes shows that it is entirely false, and could safely be forgotten. What the previous "no" votes to this review show isn't that it is unfounded or unhelpful, but that certain individuals are disappointed by the failure of someone they admire. They are flatly refusing to respect reason and truth. It's as though they believe Freud is right about humor just because he's Freud. But throwing a few rocks at the truth and ignoring it won't make it go away.

In this case it is unfortunate that a historic document is presented as actual theory, as it will cause confusion and ignorance for many generations. I wrote an entire book chapter which thoroughly discredited Freud's theory of jokes, humor, and the comic. I showed how, in several examples, he did not even get jokes in the basic sense, let alone manage to explain their psychological meaning.
Profile Image for Benjamin Fasching-Gray.
754 reviews35 followers
January 7, 2022
My older son says Freud is someone you have to chase out of the kitchen with a broom. That is true, but Freud is also someone who can admit when he doesn't know something and he is someone who solicits criticism and then responds to it. Some of my problems with this book might be the "standard edition" translation which frankly, sucks. In addition to just inventing new English words, using some obscure Greek term instead of doing the work of translating, translating one-to-one so that vorfreude becomes fore-pleasure, everything seems to be unnecessarily complicated so that readers can pat themselves on the back and tell themselves how smart they are. Maybe I am the dumb one, but it seems to me that nothing in this book is that difficult to understand if you just say it in simple language. A lot of it boils down to "insights" like, we laugh because we feel superior to the person being made fun of. He seems also to be saying that there always must be someone being made fun of, "the third person" he calls it, like the other two people are the joke teller and the joke listener. Things like puns or jokes that don't have a target are of a lesser quality, for the notoriously competitive Freud.

A bigger frustration for me is Freud's classism, racism, and general bourgeois baggage. He frequently asserts that the uneducated do not tell proper jokes, they just tell insults. At one point he is harping on this again and he throws in children and "people of other races" as being too primitive to joke, because, he claims, the uncivilized repress less, so they don't need to release their repression in jokes. What the Freud?!

Nowhere does he look at the punching up or punching down side of jokes. He does not consider really the social context of jokes beyond discussing our sympathy for certain characters in the jokes. And then often, his sympathy seems to be with the wrong people, like when discussing a Mark Twain joke where Freud seems to be on the side of the employer so therefore he doesn't think the joke is funny.

You often hear or read that Freud's models are related to steam engines, and that it's all about pressure and release. Freud talks about release so much in this book... and yeah, obviously, laughing is a release, so he is right to talk about that... but... maybe it's the translation... calling it "discharge"... it started to feel like everything for Freud is basically 'blue balls' which of course, isn't real. What if we never released anything from laughter or any of the other Freudian ways to discharge our emotional investments? I am not convinced that this a blockage and that neurosis is the inevitable outcome. Speaking of investments, Freud talks a lot about economy of movement or economy of words, when talking about jokes, as if our souls are all accountants.

There are some things to enjoy about this book, though. Some of the jokes are good. The Viennese world of that Freud-time comes through in some of his anecdotes, his references to Schiller, Heine, various politicians and nobles, or in one of my favorite bits when he says that when we turn on an electric light we remember what a pain in the ass it was to deal with the gas lights. A hundred years later, we can maybe think that Freud is gaslighting us but we have no idea what the freud a gaslight is.
Profile Image for Jake Bos.
193 reviews15 followers
October 22, 2023
Sigmund Freud’s Jokes and Their Relation to the Unconscious is one of the few serious assessments of comedy in the Western philosophical tradition. Surprisingly, the text is not nearly as dirty or quacky as one might expect. Instead, what you will find here is an intellectually rigorous deep-dive into jokes and their subconscious cathartic function. A fascinating, if somewhat dry, exploration of this overlooked dimension of the human experience.
Profile Image for Christopher Gontar.
17 reviews8 followers
February 6, 2021
This book is about several traditional types of meaning-based jokes. It was Freud's earliest attempt to publish a book on his theory of the unconscious, and one Freudian scholar (Tomas Geyskens) even believes, unrealistically, that this text is the best example of Freud's theory of sublimation in art.

Every basic class of jokes is included here, although not properly identified according to their actual type. Freud even includes a sophisticated kind in which ambiguous language is used as a means of indirect communication. But these indirection jokes, like all others, are analyzed by theorists today as "incongruity resolution." According to this erroneous view humor lies in our mere satisfaction in discovering just what is going on in a joke, in particular as it "resolves," partially or fully. That theory holds that what is mainly funny is the process itself of getting the joke. This is a false theory that certainly must be abandoned, especially considering the better alternative that I have devised.

There are in fact two classes of linguistic jokes, which the authoritative theorists lump together as one. One is merely a glorified pun or witticism, while that which thinly veils a foible in double meaning, should be known as an indirection, or "irony" joke. Freud illustrates the joke of indirection in the example about the doctor, in that passage where he explains "double meaning proper." That notion describes well the kind of ambiguity that is used both in indirect communication and in a glorified witticism.

But he also discloses, unknowingly, a third class, citing the one about a foolish café customer who hasn't paid his bill and tries to return a piece of cake to pay for his drink because he "hadn't eaten" the cake. This kind of joke is neither irony nor glorified or expanded witticism, since it directly presents self-deception -- and as that theme appears in stories like those by Isaac Bashevis Singer -- not by allusion as in most jokes.

Freud cannot explain jokes well even on a superficial level. Nevertheless, his main joke theory is clear and almost identical to the "incongruity resolution" theory. He proposes that what makes most jokes funny is that they embed an irrational discourse, lingering from childhood interest, within a rational, mature-minded framework, so that their ultimate outcome is more or less half sense and half nonsense. This view does have general applicability in that the embedding applies both to jokes that end with an assertion that requires decoding (as in indirection), or a locution that helps to partially decode what came before (thus a glorified witticism). Although Freud makes no strong connection between jokes' formal attributes and Jewish culture, one of the stories from Tales of Sendebar, a medieval romance text, turns on equivocation. That suggests such meaning-hinged comedies were prototypical jokes. A central version of Sendebar is the Hebrew one, implying that the modern ambiguity-based joke might, or should have evolved from stories such as this. The "nobody" episode in Homer's Odyssey is another example.

While this book does not include many one-liners, it makes careful note of the "tendentious" humor that such shorter jokes often exhibit. Freud mentions a quip spoken by Heinrich Heine that might be considered a one-liner, but he doesn't understand the humor in what Heine says.

Freud's examples feature salient double meanings, which he both fails to notice and to interpret as to their humorous force in general. What is the humor in double meaning? Freud should know, since it relates to his own psychology, but he doesn't have a clue. That is ironic, and the major oversight. Nevertheless -- while Freud denied it -- all such things can be explained on only one theory.

Freud's psychology would have been ideal for a theory of humor, since an adjustment to reality defines the growth of the psyche. What could be more perfect than a humor theory based on the science of accepting reality and dealing with existence? In other words, humor is always an allusion to a flight from reality, and all of psychoanalysis is centered around this idea. Although he does appear to have noticed this in the case of humor, he did not know how to develop or explain it. Now this difficulty of Freud's is related to the fact that he did not understand the actual meaning of desire, but that is a different topic.

Lost in the subtlety of jokes, Freud was not able to find a way to link his psychoanalysis with humor. This resulted in his erroneous view that jokes are a throwback to childhood nonsense and word games. Many claim that his examples are obscured by barriers of culture and language, yet this is unimportant. It's not that Freud's jokes are bad (though perhaps they are not great), but he did not understand them. Translation is never a major issue in Freud's ideas here.

Consider that, if he were right, then jokes would be no more funny than Spoonerisms. And when Freud tries to hijack all of the terms of humor theory one by one, "humor," "comedy," "wit" and "jokes" and assign unfounded meanings to them he is quite mistaken. That is just one of this book's several outrageous moves.

Note, however, that Freud is not wrong to imply as he does a connection between the uncertainty of mental development and stability, and jokes. He acknowledges this relationship by taking the illogical, frivolous and nonsensical as rebellion against mature reason. Freud is still rather far from the truth though he implies that jokes are allusive, or in other words that they are partial rebellions against reason and not complete ones. He seems to realize that they don't explicitly present the source of their power.

But Freud misses the precise sort of transgression that jokes vaguely reference. It is not a crucial matter, moreover, whether they violate meaning or logic. In either of those cases, they support only a "selfish self-deception" theory of humor, the theory that comical folly is a kind of diminutive ambition.

Jokes and comedy often express rebellion against the intended meanings that people impose. There is an old humor concept, mainly Jewish, in which one or more characters equivocate between the use, ownership or the possession of a thing. This happens in Isaac Bashevis Singer's story of Schlemiel and his wife passing the coin between them as a series of payments. Precisely the same theme appears in Freud's joke about the cake, not paid for, being returned for exchange. The intention of others is the reality of meaning that irritates the self-centered psyche. All gaffes are mistakes of meaning or of the recognition of other people and the real world. That is the essence of what a gaffe is at least as we are evolved to interpret it emotionally, through humor -- even though our sense of humor exaggerates the degree of blame, as we pounce on more involuntary errors and treat them as though they were literally comical.

Thus the humorous meaning of all jokes, which are just allusively imbedded gaffes, consists in selfish self-deception. They refer to the idea of a disregard for meaning as determined by context and other people.

One commenter to this review asks me to provide more of the evidence against Freud that I claim to have. He said, either tell me why Freud is generally wrong about humor or show how he failed to understand a few jokes. I think that what I just said above fulfills the first part of the request sufficiently. But the latter request is also basically already fulfilled. I'm not going to publish my analyses of Freud's jokes in this review. That's asking way too much.

Just go to my review of Noel Carroll's short introduction book on humor and you see the same Freudian pattern of jokes refuted. What you see there is essentially what I say about the jokes in Freud's book and his interpretation of them.

But the simple proof is that jokes are not funny on the basis of their resemblance or allusion to childhood word games. Punch lines don't merely fail to follow logically, but they involve double meaning. Freud doesn't explain the prevalence of double meaning, but he cannot because he doesn't know it's there half the time -- he misses it in several examples.

Sure, it may be difficult to explain such jokes properly and I have become skilled at it as the result of several years of intense research and thinking. I certainly was not good at it overnight or had no natural talent.

There is not a single section or argument in the book that follows logically or conforms to human experience. If anyone thought otherwise, a debate would be arranged to defend such a view. That isn't happening, and this smug silence only reflects the inability of defenders of this material to face reality. If society and academe were truly rational (obviously they're not), it would be only a matter of time before this insignificant garbage were removed from the intellectual landscape, ceasing to confuse, intimidate and mentally impoverish thousands of innocent readers. It is tragic that my own words are taken as the aggressive and tyrannical, when they are liberating.

Certain books are preserved because of who wrote them, and because they stand as landmarks along a course toward a better view. This is one of them. An honest and clear evaluation of Freud's view of jokes shows that it is entirely false, and could safely be forgotten. What the previous "no" votes to this review show isn't that it is unfounded or unhelpful, but that certain individuals are disappointed by the failure of someone they admire. They are flatly refusing to respect reason and truth. It's as though they believe Freud is right about humor just because he's Freud. But throwing a few rocks at the truth and ignoring it won't make it go away.

In this case it is unfortunate that a historic document is presented as actual theory, as it will cause confusion and ignorance for many generations. I wrote an entire book chapter which thoroughly discredited Freud's theory of jokes, humor, and the comic. I showed how, in several examples, he did not even get jokes in the basic sense, let alone manage to explain their psychological meaning.
Profile Image for Jem.
93 reviews1 follower
December 16, 2023
2.5/3 This was both interesting and boring/over explained at the same time, but …it’s Freud.

I did buy this at the Freud Museum in Austria, so it has some sentimental value for me.
Profile Image for Blaze-Pascal.
294 reviews2 followers
March 10, 2022
Lacan told me to read this in Seminar V.
When I picked it up and looked at how long it was, I was a bit pissed, because I am already reading a lot, but I guess I'm happy I read it now! And I can continue Seminar V.

The first part of his book on jokes is actually quite dull... he goes over many jokes (of which few are still funny today) and explains why they are funny. I have a few bookmarks, and for the this review I am not going to go over the terms Freud goes over, but in Lacanian terms, he is suggesting that they are linked to a signifying chain... for example "Fa-millionaire" or double entendres. I notice that whenever I try to make a joke, I am actually always looking for some sort of double meaning with the word... for example:
"Did you hear that Slavoj Zizek has been diagnosed with lime disease?"
... (wait for the expected answer of no...)
Punchline:
"He has too many ticks".

Now see we have played with the word tick here, and it has a double meaning... many many jokes are like this. And if we are subjects of language primarily, and the unconscious is structured like a language, this helps explain why double entendres are so important in the act of analysis, or even slips of tongue.

Now after a lot of boring stuff, like this, I really started to enjoy the part where he discusses dreams... this was the prime real estate of the book for me, and I got real excited. Joke-work is similar to dream work. I like this a lot. Very enticing.

And then the book ends with why a comic is a comic... and let's be clear, stand up comedy did not exist in the era of Freud, so looking forward to the great American art of stand up comedy, it just becomes obvious that some of the funniest comics are working through their pains and emotional struggles (ex. Louis CK).
I imagine Seinfeld and Larry David, two of my favourites, are probably doing something on the greater level of the Other, talking about cultural repressions rather than making it personal, but I think it's in the nature of Larry David (or even Woody Allen) to make his own neuroticism the source of the comedy.

Glad I read it, quite long, but very interesting none the less.
Profile Image for Erik Graff.
5,060 reviews1,222 followers
June 8, 2008
I picked this one up at a used bookstore in Three Oaks during the summer Martin and I were taking care of my little brother, Fin, in Michigan. Up to this point I think I'd only read his Civilization and Its Discontents and his Interpretation of Dreams. Starting with that summer, however, I began to plow my way through all of Freud's works.

Brill's translation of Der Witz und seine Beziehung zum Unbewußten was occasionally mildly amusing. Freud apparently had a sense of humor, ranging from mild to sharp sarcasm, himself. The points made, however, are so much now commonplace that the reader will likely not learn anything not already assumed. The sceptic, however, may find Freud's arguments reason to reconsider the hypothesis of the unconscious mind.
Profile Image for Karmen.
Author 9 books41 followers
February 7, 2012
With all the respect to Freud and his genuinely authentic and brave pioneering theory on humour/jokes I found this book very tortuous to read. And not only because most of the jokes aren't funny anymore but probably were at the time the book was written, but mostly because of his style of writing that is highly academic and seems like his stream of thoughts, not very well structured.

I am actually not surprised that lots of the theoreticians on humour refer to this work only in one or two sentences, summing up the most obvious division of jokes to innocent and tendentious ones. The rest is quite hard to consume.
Profile Image for Roberto Rigolin F Lopes.
363 reviews103 followers
October 25, 2015
Here we have Freud showing off his bag of jokes; the man had an odd taste, even for 1905 (?). He goes about explaining the joke-techniques, motives and… well, the amusing thing is that he dared to explain all this crap to us. Unbelievable, Freud! :-)
Profile Image for erin.
5 reviews
January 29, 2023
Provides a unique (and necessary) contribution to the theory of humour, although objectively flawed in some of it's presented assumptions.
Profile Image for I-kai.
144 reviews10 followers
November 12, 2018
An interesting account of jokes and their relation to the naive, the ironic, the comic, and humor. Still somehow prefer Bergson, whose view of laughter is discussed in this work. Fun if not funny. There are some obscure parts I still don't totally understand.
Profile Image for Readius Maximus.
212 reviews2 followers
May 26, 2021
The joke, comedy, and humor are funny according to Freud because they save us psychical energy.

The joke because it is able to release energy that is being repressed from our rational conscious critic. For example I told someone who was driving and having a hard time following the verbal directions of Siri that “you should be good at following the voices” ie that they are crazy are familiar to following the voices in their head and should be better at following directions because of that. This is not something that is acceptable to say but when condensed and disguised it is able to by pass the critic. Jokes also say a lot in a little which is why it’s no longer funny when you have to explain it. The joke achieves this through condensation, double meaning, and absurdity. Much like the dream work in dreams. Which reveals that the joke originates in the unconscious.

Comedy is funny largely through comparison which saves energy in imagining ideas. Comedy is funny when it exaggerated physical movements and shortens and cuts too much out of ideas and mental processes. A clown is funny because his movements are exaggerated which we compare to movements we have done or imagine doing and thus find it funny. The fool is funny because he oversimplifies ideas. Which we also compare with our own ideas and laugh at the jump in logic the fool made.

Humor is funny or enjoyable because it saves us from feeling certain unpleasurable things. The rogue as he walks to the gallows to be hung on Monday says “well that’s a good start to the week” causes the audience to laugh because it saves them from having to repress any pity for the rogue who is about the have his week cut short.
Profile Image for Remo.
2,324 reviews148 followers
January 19, 2021
Pensé que tendría más enjundia. Freud analiza una serie de chistes de principios del s. XX (muchos de los cuales siguen vigentes, mutatis mutandi:
- Si compra usted este caballo y echa a trotar por la mañana, por la tarde estará en Viena
- ¿Y yo para qué quiero estar en Viena por la tarde?)
El autor destripa los chistes de manera absolutamente abominable, extrayéndoles hasta el último gramo de gracia que pudiera quedarles y desechando luego los cadáveres. No hay nada más aburrido que leer a Freud destripando un chiste. Luego, en plan método científico, intenta extraer hipótesis de la observación de muchos chistes, y él mismo se valida esas hipótesis porque tiene sentido.
En muchas ocasiones el autor llega a que la gracia del chiste es que mezcla algo obvio con algo irracional, y que a nuestro cerebro eso le hace gracia porque le recuerda a nuestra infancia. Cosas así. El paso de la materia prima a la hipótesis no (me) convence nunca.
Profile Image for Daniel.
275 reviews20 followers
July 7, 2016
The idea here's that jokes, like dreams, are roads leading to the unconscious. You can interpret joke-texts like dream-texts, identifying the wish-fulfillment at the heart of the former's humor. An interesting theory, but not that convincingly supported and somewhat difficult to follow in translation...
Profile Image for mavromou.
144 reviews4 followers
February 9, 2018
Es la primera vez que leo un libro de Freud, creo que le queda muy bien el apodo de "el padre del psicoanálisis", dado que en todo el libro no deja un momento sin hacer el análisis de los conceptos que trata.

Sin ser psicólogo, debo decir que pude aprovechar y comprender bastante dado que si bien usa conceptos propios de la psicología los define o explica.

El libro trata sobre las técnicas de los distintos tipos de chistes que alcanza a clasificar el autor, si bien hace referencia a sustituciones, desplazamientos y distintos conceptos que usan otros autores para explicar las técnicas del chiste, siempre los conceptos son explicados en términos psicológicos, del placer, ahorro de energía psíquica, los cuales usa para comparar, hacia el final del libro los conceptos de el chiste, lo cómico, y el humor.

Esto último fue muy interesante dado que me ayudó a entender las sutiles diferencias, que según Freud, existen entre los tres conceptos y cómo se relacionan entre sí.

También al comparar los chistes con los procesos de lo inconsciente en particular con el sueño, me dió varias pistas interesantes para trasladar estos conceptos a mi estudio sobre la creatividad, dado que ciertos procesos o etapas de esta última también se la asocia a los sueños y lo inconsciente.

Cita a varios autores con conceptos muy interesantes, entre ellos Bergson, con el cual acuerda e interpreta su teoría con sus propios conceptos.

Es un libro muy conveniente para los que estén interesados en comprender las técnicas del chiste y lo cómico.
498 reviews3 followers
January 5, 2018
some books by freud - such as studies in hysteria, the interpretation of dreams, the psychopathology of everyday life - have an elegance to them that makes it easy to overlook any shenanigans that might be going on in the background. others, such as three theories on sexuality and this book, meld some startling and brilliant passages with forced maneuvers that leave me with a feeling of having read a good try instead of a thing of beauty.

i quite like this translation by joyce crick, though i have not read brill's or strachey's, so i can't do a valid comparison. i am especially heartened, however, by the relatively lengthy translator's introduction, due both to its content and that the publishers gave the translator that much room and respect. the introduction by john carey, however, was an irritating affair, containing the same sort of unsupportable theories about freud as the author accuses freud of committing in this book. the inevitable political correctness oozes through as well, with the passages that carey considers to be brilliant of course matching the mores of political academia today. much of the rest, rather than an attempt at clarification, suffer some rather one-sided criticism instead. perhaps the criticism is well-deserved, as i didn't feel the book held up too well either, but i thought it merited more than it received from carey.
Profile Image for Aljoša.
99 reviews17 followers
July 4, 2021
Freud’s [b]Jokes and Their Relation to the Unconscious[/b] tells us a bunch of quite hilarious jokes and then attempts to explain why exactly we laugh at them. As such, it proved to be quite a dear book to Ludwig Wittgenstein, who took it as a shining example of a philosophy that directly ‘shows’ us its method at work. Famously, he remarked that a serious and good philosophical work could be written consisting entirely of jokes, probably in reference to this one. However, the book does get quite dry after the first part that’s full of juicy jokes.

One of my favorites examples in this book tries to explain the relation between innocence and humor. It’s about a young brother and a sister creating a play for their family. The brother is a poor fisherman who decides to cross the sea to find wealth, while the sister is his wife who stays at home. They always wanted to be rich and have a big family. So when after years of absence the husband(brother) finally returns home, he shows his wife the fortunes he found. The wife smiles and tells him that she also worked hard on their goals while he was away and opens the gate of their house to reveal 12 baby dolls on the bed. At that point the people watching the play lose it and burst out laughing, much to the shock of the two young actors who wrote the play.
93 reviews
January 24, 2022
Probably the most confused of Freud's books, it really resembles trying to fit a round peg into a square hole.

Yes, explaining a joke ruins the pleasure of it's effect, expressed in laughter. Freud would say that laughter is the expression of psychical energy that has nowhere else to go; in listening to a joke, you build up assumptions about how it's going to end, and then when it uses a joke technique to pleasurably deny this assumption, the psychical energy you built up in anticipation has to go somewhere - a laugh. All of this is automatic. A joke isn't funny is this automatic process does not occur; explaining the joke doesn't produce humor because it couldn't, the game has already been lost.

Here's the thing, in Freud's economic explanation of the joke, the comic, and the humorous, many of his observations ring true - but they obviously fail as a complete theory. The ways in which humans laugh and create jokes makes, in my opinion, any kind of unified theory a enterprise doomed to failure. The book is, however, an interesting and valuable failure. The categories that he creates are good jumping off points for further theorizations of the joke; Freud's joke book is best understood as the first chapter in a larger joke book following on from him.
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