ABSTRACT
Freud collected jokes – Witz in German – including Jewish ones, and he had a strong sense of humour; it is hardly surprising, then, that he tried to discover the hidden motivations that make us laugh at jokes. In this book, he makes a systematic exploration of many different forms of comical material which come under the heading of jokes, and suggests that they reveal the unconscious influence which, in a covert way, dominates speech and language. To that extent, the mechanisms which produce a comic effect are very similar to the work that the mind accomplishes through dreams: we find condensation, in other words saying little in order to express much; displacement, which enables prohibitions to be circumvented, particularly those which censorship places on repressed aggressive or sexual content (while still allowing them to return in some other shape or form); and finally the process of representability, which modifies the form of words, creating double meanings or plays upon words, transforming thinking by creating something nonsensical or replacing one thought by its opposite. However, unlike dreams, which Freud considered to be a-social products, jokes are the most social of all the mind’s activities: a joke is a sophisticated game which aims at an increase in pleasure, so that the mechanism of regression is not active in this domain in the way as it is in dreams. The pursuit of pleasure exists also in dreams, of course, but there pleasure is obtained through regression to hallucinatory satisfaction in order to avoid unpleasure.
