ABSTRACT
Seen in this context, the long section on joke techniques which opens the book has two clear purposes: to establish that the technical description of jokes tells us nothing about their basis in the mind; and to prepare the ground for the later assertion that different categories of jokes, defined technically, occupy different places in the ecology of the mind. To this end, Freud divides jokes into groups on a basis which is simultaneously technical and ecological. His major distinctions are between verbal/conceptual jokes, and between innocent/ tendentious jokes; he also uses the term ‘jest’ to refer to purely verbal and innocent jokes, and distinguishes between the joke (der Witz) and Schwanke (funny stories); this distinction is based on the distribution of enunciative roles in the two forms, where Schwanke have only two and jokes three. We shall see that it is also possible that there is nonetheless a single fundamental mechanism common to all forms of jokes, jests, etc., indicating a single relationship to the unconscious.
