Jokes and their Relation to the Unconscious

Freud takes apart a pun of Heine's and a run of marriage-broker jokes to show that a joke is built the way a dream is.

German, the original language

Original title: Der Witz und seine Beziehung zum Unbewußten
First published: 1905(aged 49)
Original language: German

Overview

One of Heinrich Heine's characters, a poor lottery agent named Hirsch-Hyacinth, boasts that the great Baron Rothschild treated him as an equal, quite famillionär. Earlier writers on wit, among them the Dutch psychologist Gerard Heymans and the Munich philosopher Theodor Lipps, had explained why such a word makes people laugh: it bewilders for a moment, and then the meaning dawns. Sigmund Freud asks a different question — how the word was made. Two words, "familiar" and "millionaire", are pressed into one, and a resentful thought about a rich man's condescension is carried inside it without ever being stated. His book argues that jokes are built by the same work as dreams: compression, displacement, the double meaning of words. The pleasure they give comes from a saving of mental effort, and jokes with a purpose, hostile or obscene, let a listener enjoy for a moment what his own inhibitions would otherwise forbid. A joke, unlike a dream, is social: it is not finished until a third person hears it and laughs. Many of Freud's examples are Jewish jokes, including a long run about marriage brokers, and he observes that the best of them were made by Jews about their own failings, while outsiders' jokes about Jews were mostly brutal. Franz Deuticke published the book in Leipzig and Vienna in 1905, the year of Freud's Three Essays on the Theory of Sexuality. A. A. Brill translated it as Wit and Its Relation to the Unconscious; James Strachey's translation of 1960 changed wit to jokes. Freud came back to the subject in 1927 with a short paper on humour.

Key concepts

What is the joke-work?

The joke-work is the set of techniques that turns a thought into a joke, named after the dream-work it resembles. Freud lists condensation, as when two words fuse into one; the double use of the same material, as in a pun; and displacement, where the reply shifts the point of a remark. His test is reduction: retell the thought in other words, and if the laughter disappears, the technique was the joke.

What does Freud mean by sense in nonsense?

Sense in nonsense is his name for jokes that look absurd but carry a point. The absurdity is not decoration: it lets the listener enjoy the old freedom of playing with words and ideas without regard for logic, while the hidden sense satisfies the adult critic who would otherwise forbid that play. Freud sees the same mix in dreams, where absurdity often expresses scorn.

What is fore-pleasure in a joke?

Fore-pleasure is the small pleasure the joke's technique gives on its own, which then unlocks a larger one. In a hostile or obscene joke the wordplay is the bait: it offers a little enjoyment, and in doing so lifts the inhibition that had held back a much stronger pleasure in aggression or sexual content. Freud also calls it an incentive bonus.

How do jokes, the comic and humour differ?

All three give pleasure by saving mental effort, Freud concludes, but they save different kinds. A joke saves the effort normally spent on inhibition. The comic, found in a clumsy movement or a slow mind, saves the effort of thinking, because we compare another's excess with our own economy. Humour saves feeling: the pain or pity a situation calls for is spared.

What is the naive?

The naive is the kind of comedy closest to a joke, found mostly in children. A child says something that would be a joke, perhaps a frank remark about sex, but without knowing it, because the inhibition the adult has is not yet there. The listener laughs because he knows the child's innocence and so spares himself the indignation the same words would earn from an adult.

Themes of the book

What this book returns to, gathered into themes and ordered by how much of the text each one occupies.

A Joke Is Made Like a Dream

What, exactly, makes a joke a joke? Freud asks not why people laugh but how the thing was built, and the answer leads back to his dream book.

Earlier theorists described the experience of getting a joke: bewilderment, then sudden insight. Freud takes jokes apart instead, and tests each by retelling its thought plainly to see where the laughter goes. What he finds is the machinery of dreams: words pressed together, emphasis shifted, a faulty logic that looks like reasoning, nonsense that turns out to carry sense. The joke is formed for a moment in the unconscious, he argues, and its roots lie in a child's play with the sounds of words.

wit
wordplay
language
condensation
displacement
ambiguity
dreams
unconscious
childhood

Enter a dialogue

What a Joke Gets Away With

Why do we laugh hardest at what we would never say? A joke with a purpose, hostile or obscene, slips past the inhibition that would have stopped the plain remark.

Some jokes are innocent; others serve aggression or sex, and Freud finds these give the strongest laughter. The joke's technique offers a small pleasure that lures us into a larger one, the release of an effort we normally spend holding an impulse down. A joke, unlike a dream, is social: it needs a listener in whom the saved effort turns to laughter. Cynical jokes go further and attack institutions, marriage among them, and the sharpest self-criticism, Freud notes, comes from a people mocking its own failings.

humor
pleasure
laughter
aggression
sexuality
inhibition
psychic economy
communication
comedy

Enter a dialogue

Within this work

passages held: 435
distinct concepts: 309
by passages held, corpus-wide: #170

What this book thinks together

The wheel takes this book’s leading concepts and shows how often they come up together. The wider the band between two, the more of its passages speak of both. Among them, most often together: “humor” and “language”.

Concept co-occurrence, strongest first 8 concepts, joined by 24 pairings. 83 pairings reach beyond these concepts and are not drawn.
Concept	Paired concept	Shared passages
humor	language	49
humor	wit	46
humor	wordplay	46
humor	pleasure	33
language	wordplay	33
humor	laughter	28
language	wit	27
comedy	humor	21
comedy	wit	18
humor	unconscious	18
unconscious	wit	16
wit	wordplay	16
comedy	laughter	6
comedy	unconscious	6
language	pleasure	6
comedy	language	5
laughter	pleasure	5
language	unconscious	4
pleasure	wit	4
comedy	wordplay	3
pleasure	unconscious	3
comedy	pleasure	1
laughter	unconscious	1
laughter	wordplay	1

Works held

The author's work in order, this book marked in place. Your-language title first, the original beneath it where the two differ; side chips show which full texts are held.

1900 The Interpretation of Dreams (Die Traumdeutung)
Begun from his own dreams in the 1890s and enlarged in edition after edition, this is where Freud sets out the method of interpretation that his later books apply to slips of the tongue, jokes and myths.
DE
1901 The Psychopathology of Everyday Life (Zur Psychopathologie des Alltagslebens)
The dream book's method carried into waking life; its slips and forgettings became the opening part of the lectures Freud later gave to beginners in Vienna.
DE
1905 Jokes and their Relation to the Unconscious (Der Witz und seine Beziehung zum Unbewußten) you are here DE
1907 Frühe Schriften zu Religion und Dichtung
Two early excursions from the clinic, gathered here in one volume: the seed of Freud's later books on religion, and his short account of where a writer's stories come from.
DE
1910 Zur Theorie des Unbewußten
Four theoretical papers written between 1910 and 1915 and gathered here in one volume, on the road from the dream book to the metapsychological essays of 1915 — the last of the four is one of those essays.
DE
1913 Spätere Schriften zu Dichtung und Mythos
Two essays from 1913 and 1917, gathered here in one volume, that show Freud the reader of Shakespeare and Goethe: the dream-book method applied to a stage motif and to the first page of a famous autobiography.
DE
1913 Totem and Taboo (Totem und Tabu)
The first of Freud's books on society and religion, where he moves from the patient to the human species; Group Psychology, The Future of an Illusion and his last book, on Moses, all build on its story of the murdered father.
DE
1914 On Narcissism: An Introduction (Zur Einführung des Narzißmus)
A short essay written as Jung was breaking with Freud, and the hinge between his early theory of the drives and the later picture of ego and super-ego.
DE
1915 Instincts and their Vicissitudes (Triebe und Triebschicksale)
The paper that opens Freud's 1915 theoretical series by defining its basic term; the companion essays on repression and on the unconscious build on it.
DE
1915 Schriften aus dem Weltkrieg
Freud's direct responses to the First World War, gathered in one volume on this site: a long essay of 1915 on disillusionment and death, and a short one of 1916 on transience and mourning.
DE
1915 The Unconscious (Das Unbewußte)
Freud's fullest account of what he meant by the unconscious, written in wartime Vienna eight years before The Ego and the Id redrew his map of the mind.
DE
1917 Introductory Lectures on Psycho-Analysis (Vorlesungen zur Einführung in die Psychoanalyse)
Freud's own introduction to his work, and the closest thing he wrote to a textbook: his books on dreams and on everyday slips retold for listeners, then carried on into a general theory of neurosis.
DE
1919 The 'Uncanny' (Das Unheimliche)
A rare venture by Freud into aesthetics, a field he says psychoanalysts seldom feel drawn to, written in 1919 beside the first draft of Beyond the Pleasure Principle.
DE
1920 Beyond the Pleasure Principle (Jenseits des Lustprinzips)
The hinge of Freud's later work: the 1920 book that introduces the death drive, followed within three years by the new map of the mind in The Ego and the Id.
DE
1921 Group Psychology and the Analysis of the Ego (Massenpsychologie und Ich-Analyse)
The bridge between Freud's speculations on prehistory and his new model of the mind: its chapter on a "grade in the ego" sets out the ego ideal that The Ego and the Id would rename two years later.
DE
1923 The Ego and the Id (Das Ich und das Es)
The book in which Freud's later model of the mind takes its final shape; the essays and books that follow it, on anxiety, religion and civilisation, all speak its language of ego, id and super-ego.
DE
1924 Späte Schriften zur Ich-Psychologie
Three short papers of the mid-1920s, gathered here in one volume, in which Freud tests the model of The Ego and the Id on psychosis, on memory and on laughter.
DE
1926 Inhibitions, Symptoms and Anxiety (Hemmung, Symptom und Angst)
Written three years after The Ego and the Id, it rebuilds the theory of neurotic symptoms in that book's terms, starting from the difference between a symptom and an inhibition, a restriction the ego places on itself.
DE
1927 The Future of an Illusion (Die Zukunft einer Illusion)
Freud's most direct case against religion, written fourteen years after Totem and Taboo had traced it to the murdered father, and the opening of the late cultural writings that continue in Civilization and Its Discontents.
DE

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