ABSTRACT
This chapter outlines the shortcomings of Freud's contemporaries in joke theory and stakes his claim to provide a more synthetic account, to expand the object of research by including the despised genres of smutty jokes and Jewish jokes. Freud's interest lies not in humour on its own account but in the psyche, and his text specifically seeks to locate the joke as part of unconscious processes. For one thing, this means that any reader unwilling to run, at least temporarily, with Freud's key premises about preconscious and unconscious, about psychical economy and cathexis, can make little use of his study of jokes. The joke about joking might have shifted the argument away from the unconscious and towards the wider social world of texts and speech acts. Neither can the book offer a comprehensive theory, for joke types that do not fit the model of the plunge into the unconscious are resolutely excluded.
