ABSTRACT
The joke disarms or defuses criticism, or censorship, diverts attention or tension. It thereby liberates an aggressive, teasing or mocking form of expression, in a side-step that tempers the attack or conceals it. Although it is aimed at one person or another, it is also generally addressed to a third party or to a public, tasked, through its reaction, with confirming its intention, sometimes double, sometimes ambiguous. In the joke, the play on words involves a polysemy of language by means of consonances or assonances provoking effects of shifts of meaning in which the “repressed” can be revealed. An inventory of jokes could no doubt constitute a dictionary in itself, at the risk of toning down the effects of surprise and the situational effects of their enunciation.
