bringing into prominence of sexual facts or relations through speech.
However, this definition is no sounder than other definitions. A lecture
on the anatomy of the sexual organs or on the physiology of reproduction
need not, in spite of this definition, have anything in common with an
obscenity. It must be added that the smutty joke is directed toward a
certain person who excites one sexually, and who becomes cognizant of
the speaker’s excitement by listening to the smutty joke, and thereby in
turn becomes sexually excited. Instead of becoming sexually excited the
listener may react with shame and embarrassment, which merely signifies
a reaction against the excitement and indirectly an admission of the
same. The smutty joke was originally directed against the woman and is
comparable to an attempt at seduction. If a man tells or listens to
obscene jokes in male society, the original situation, which cannot be
realized on account of social inhibitions, is thereby also represented.
Whoever laughs at a smutty joke does the same as the spectator who
laughs at a sexual aggression.
The sexual element which is at the basis of the obscene joke comprises
more than that which is peculiar to both sexes, and goes beyond that
which is common to both sexes, it is connected with all these things
that cause shame, and includes the whole domain of the excrementitious.
However, this was the sexual domain of childhood, where the imagination
fancied a cloaca, so to speak, within which the sexual elements were
either badly or not at all differentiated from the excrementitious.[39]
In the whole mental domain of the psychology of the neuroses, the sexual
still includes the excrementitious, and it is understood in the old,
infantile sense.
The smutty joke is like the denudation of a person of the opposite sex
toward whom the joke is directed. Through the utterance of obscene words
the person attacked is forced to picture the parts of the body in
question, or the sexual act, and is shown that the aggressor himself
pictures the same thing. There is no doubt that the original motive of
the smutty joke was the pleasure of seeing the sexual displayed.
It will only help to clarify the subject if here we go back to the
fundamentals. One of the primitive components of our libido is the
desire to see the sexual exposed. Perhaps this itself is a development—a
substitution for the desire to touch which is assumed to be the primary
pleasure. As it often happens, the desire to see has here also replaced
the desire to touch.[40] The libido for looking and touching is found in
every person in two forms, active and passive, or masculine and
feminine; and in accordance with the preponderance of sex
characteristics it develops preponderately in one or the other
direction. In young children one can readily observe the desire to
exhibit themselves nude. If the germ of this desire does not experience
the usual fate of being covered up and repressed, it develops into a
mania for exhibitionism, a familiar perversion among grown-up men. In
women the passive desire to exhibit is almost regularly covered by the
masked reaction of sexual modesty; despite this, however, remnants of
this desire may always be seen in women’s dress. I need only mention how
flexible and variable convention and circumstances make that remaining
portion of exhibitionism still allowed to women.
_The Transformation of the Obscenity into Obscene Wit_
In the case of men a great part of this striving to exhibit remains as a
part of the libido and serves to initiate the sexual act. If this
striving asserts itself on first meeting the woman it must make use of
speech for two motives. First, in order to make itself known to the
woman; and secondly, because the awakening of the imagination through
speech puts the woman herself in a corresponding excitement and awakens
in her the desire to passive exhibitionism. This speech of courtship is
not yet smutty, but may pass over into the same. Wherever the
yieldingness of the woman manifests itself quickly, smutty speech is
short-lived, for it gives way to the sexual act. It is different if the
rapid yielding of the woman cannot be counted upon, but instead there
appears the defense reaction. In that case the sexually exciting speech
changes into obscene wit as its own end; as the sexual aggression is
inhibited in its progress towards the act, it lingers at the evocation
of the excitement and derives pleasure from the indications of the same
in the woman. In this process the aggression changes its character in
the same way as any libidinous impulse confronted by a hindrance; it
becomes distinctly hostile and cruel, and utilizes the sadistical
components of the sexual impulse against the hindrance.
Thus the unyieldingness of the woman is therefore the next condition for
the development of smutty wit; to be sure, this resistance must be of
the kind to indicate merely a deferment and make it appear that further
efforts will not be in vain. The ideal case of such resistance on the
part of the woman usually results from the simultaneous presence of
another man, a third person, whose presence almost excludes the
immediate yielding of the woman. This third person soon becomes of the
greatest importance for the development of the smutty wit, but next to
him the presence of the woman must be taken account of. Among rural
people or in the ordinary hostelry one can observe that not till the
waitress or the hostess approaches the guests does the obscene wit come
out; in a higher order of society just the opposite happens, here the
presence of a woman puts an end to smutty talk. The men reserve this
kind of conversation, which originally presupposed the presence of
bashful women, until they are alone, “by themselves.” Thus gradually the
spectator, now turned the listener, takes the place of the woman as the
object of the smutty joke, and through such a change the smutty joke
already approaches the character of wit.
Henceforth our attention may be centered upon two factors, first upon
the rôle that the third person—the listener—plays, and secondly, upon
the intrinsic conditions of the smutty joke itself.
Tendency-wit usually requires three persons. Besides the one who makes
the wit there is a second person who is taken as the object of the
hostile or sexual aggression, and a third person in whom the purpose of
the wit to produce pleasure is fulfilled. We shall later on inquire into
the deeper motive of this relationship, for the present we shall adhere
to the fact which states that it is not the maker of the wit who laughs
about it and enjoys its pleasurable effect, but it is the idle listener
who does. The same relationship exists among the three persons connected
with the smutty joke. The process may be described as follows: As soon
as the libidinous impulse of the first person, to satisfy himself
through the woman, is blocked, he immediately develops a hostile
attitude towards this second person and takes the originally intruding
third person as his confederate. Through the obscene speech of the first
person the woman is exposed before the third person, who as a listener
is fascinated by the easy gratification of his own libido.
It is curious that common people so thoroughly enjoy such smutty talk,
and that it is a never-lacking activity of cheerful humor. It is also
worthy of notice that in this complicated process which shows so many
characteristics of tendency-wit, no formal demands, such as characterize
wit, are made upon “smutty wit.” The unveiled nudity affords pleasure to
the first and makes the third person laugh.
Not until we come to the refined and cultured does the formal
determination of wit arise. The obscenity becomes witty and is tolerated
only if it is witty. The technical means of which it mostly makes use is
allusion, i.e., substitution through a trifle, something remotely
related, which the listener reconstructs in his imagination as a
full-fledged and direct obscenity. The greater the disproportion between
what is directly offered in the obscenity and what is necessarily
aroused by it in the mind of the listener, the finer is the witticism
and the higher it may venture in good society. Besides the coarse and
delicate allusions, the witty obscenity also utilizes all other means of
word- and thought-wit, as can be easily demonstrated by examples.
_The Function of Wit in the Service of the Tendency_
It now becomes comprehensible what wit accomplishes through this service
of its tendency. It makes possible the gratification of a craving (lewd
or hostile) despite a hindrance which stands in the way; it eludes the
hindrance and so derives pleasure from a source that has become
inaccessible on account of the hindrance. The hindrance in the way is
really nothing more than the higher degree of culture and education
which correspondingly increases the inability of the woman to tolerate
the stark sex. The woman thought of as present in the final situation is
still considered present, or her influence acts as a deterrent to the
men even in her absence. One often notices how cultured men are
influenced by the company of girls of a lower station in life to change
witty obscenities to broad smut.
The power which renders it difficult or impossible for the woman, and in
a lesser degree for the man, to enjoy unveiled obscenities we call
“repression,” and we recognize in it the same psychic process which
keeps from consciousness in severe nervous attacks whole complexes of
emotions with their resultant affects, and has shown itself to be the
principal factor in the causation of the so-called psychoneuroses. We
acknowledge to culture and higher civilization an important influence in
the development of repressions, and assume that under these conditions
there has come about a change in our psychic organization which may also
have been brought along as an inherited disposition. In consequence of
it, what was once accepted as pleasureful is now counted unacceptable
and is rejected by means of all the psychic forces. Owing to the
repression brought about by civilization many primary pleasures are now
disapproved by the censor and lost. But the human psyche finds
renunciation very difficult; hence we discover that tendency-wit
furnishes us with a means to make the renunciation retrogressive and
thus to regain what has been lost. When we laugh over a delicately
obscene witticism, we laugh at the identical thing which causes laughter
in the ill-bred man when he hears a coarse, obscene joke; in both cases
the pleasure comes from the same source. The coarse, obscene joke,
however, could not incite us to laughter, because it would cause us
shame or would seem to us disgusting; we can laugh only when wit comes
to our aid.
What we had presumed in the beginning seems to have been confirmed,
namely, that tendency-wit has access to other sources of pleasure than
harmless wit, in which all the pleasure is somehow dependent upon the
technique. We can also reiterate that owing to our feelings we are in no
position to distinguish in tendency-wit what part of the pleasure
originates from the technique and what part from the tendency. _Strictly
speaking, we do not know what we are laughing about._ In all obscene
jokes we succumb to striking mistakes of judgment about the “goodness”
of the joke as far as it depends upon formal conditions; the technique
of these jokes is often very poor while their laughing effect is
enormous.
_Invectives Made Possible Through Wit_
We next wish to determine whether the rôle of wit in the service of the
hostile tendency is the same.
Right from the start we meet with similar conditions. Since our
individual childhood and the childhood of human civilization, our
hostile impulses towards our fellow-beings have been subjected to the
same restrictions and the same progressive repressions as our sexual
strivings. We have not yet progressed so far as to love our enemies, or
to extend to them our left cheek after we are smitten on the right.
Furthermore, all moral codes about the subjection of active hatred bear
even to-day the clearest indications that they were originally meant for
a small community of clansmen. As we all may consider ourselves members
of some nation, we permit ourselves for the most part to forget these
restrictions in matters touching a foreign people. But within our own
circles we have nevertheless made progress in the mastery of hostile
emotions. Lichtenberg drastically puts it when he says: “Where nowadays
one says, ‘I beg your pardon,’ formerly one had recourse to a cuff on
the ear.” Violent hostility, no longer tolerated by law, has been
replaced by verbal invectives, and the better understanding of the
concatenation of human emotions robs us, through its consequential
“_Tout comprendre c’est tout pardonner_,” more and more of the capacity
to become angry at our fellowman who is in our way. Having been endowed
with a strong hostile disposition in our childhood, higher personal
civilization teaches us later that it is undignified to use abusive
language; even where combat is still permitted, the number of things
which may be used as means of combat has been markedly restricted.
Society, as the third and dispassionate party in the combat to whose
interest it is to safeguard personal safety, prevents us from expressing
our hostile feelings in action; and hence, as in sexual aggression,
there has developed a new technique of invectives, the aim of which is
to enlist this third person against our enemy. By belittling and
humbling our enemy, by scorning and ridiculing him, we indirectly obtain
the pleasure of his defeat by the laughter of the third person, the
inactive spectator.
We are now prepared for the rôle that wit plays in hostile aggression.
Wit permits us to make our enemy ridiculous through that which we could
not utter loudly or consciously on account of existing hindrances; in
other words, _wit affords us the means of surmounting restrictions and
of opening up otherwise inaccessible pleasure-sources_. Moreover, the
listener will be induced by the gain in pleasure to take our part, even
if he is not altogether convinced,—just as we on other occasions, when
fascinated by harmless witticism, were wont to overestimate the
substance of the sentence wittily expressed. “To prejudice the laughter
in one’s own favor” is a completely pertinent saying in the German
language.
One may recall Mr. N.’s witticism given in the last chapter (p. 28). It
is of an insulting nature, as if the author wished to shout loudly: But
the minister of agriculture is himself an ox! But he, as a man of
culture, could not put his opinion in this form. He therefore appealed
to wit which assured his opinion a reception at the hands of the
listeners which, in spite of its amount of truth, never would have been
received if in an unwitty form. Brill cites an excellent example of a
similar kind: _Wendell Phillips, according to a recent biography by Dr.
Lorenzo Sears, was on one occasion lecturing in Ohio, and while on a
railroad journey going to keep one of his appointments met in the car a
number of clergymen returning from some sort of convention. One of the
ministers, feeling called upon to approach Mr. Phillips, asked him, “Are
you Mr. Phillips?” “I am, sir.” “Are you trying to free the niggers?”
“Yes, sir; I am an abolitionist.” “Well, why do you preach your
doctrines up here? Why don’t you go over into Kentucky?” “Excuse me, are
you a preacher?” “I am, sir.” “Are you trying to save souls from hell?”
“Yes, sir, that’s my business.” “Well, why don’t you go there?”_ The
assailant hurried into the smoker amid a roar of unsanctified laughter.
This anecdote nicely illustrates the tendency-wit in the service of
hostile aggression. The minister’s behavior was offensive and
irritating, yet Wendell Phillips as a man of culture could not defend
himself in the same manner as a common, ill-bred person would have done,
and as his inner feelings must have prompted him to do. The only
alternative under the circumstances would have been to take the affront
in silence, had not wit showed him the way, and enabled him by the
technical means of unification to turn the tables on his assailant. He
not only belittled him and turned him into ridicule, but by his clever
retort, “Well, why don’t you go there?” fascinated the other clergymen,
and thus brought them to his side.
Although the hindrance to the aggression which the wit helped to elude
was in these cases of an inner nature—the æsthetic resistance against
insulting—it may at other times be of a purely outer nature. So it was
in the case when Serenissimus asked the stranger who had a striking
resemblance to himself: “Was your mother ever in my home?” and he
received the ready reply, “No, but my father was.” The stranger would
certainly have felled the imprudent inquirer who dared to make an
ignominious allusion to the memory of his mother; but this imprudent
person was Serenissimus, who may not be felled and not even insulted
unless one wishes to pay for this revenge with his life. The only thing
left was to swallow the insult in silence; but luckily wit pointed out
the way of requiting the insult without personally imperiling one’s
self. It was accomplished simply by treating the allusion with the
technical means of unification and employing it against the aggressor.
The impression of wit is here so thoroughly determined by the tendency
that in view of the witty rejoinder we are inclined to forget that the
aggressor’s inquiry is itself made witty by allusion.
_Rebellion Against Authority Through Wit_
The prevention of abuse or insulting retorts through outer circumstances
is so often the case that tendency-wit is used with special preference
as a weapon of attack or criticism of superiors who claim to be an
authority. Wit then serves as a resistance against such authority and as
an escape from its pressure. In this factor, too, lies the charm of
caricature, at which we laugh even if it is badly done simply because we
consider its resistance to authority a great merit.
If we keep in mind that tendency-wit is so well adapted as a weapon of
attack upon what is great, dignified, and mighty, that which is shielded
by internal hindrances or external circumstance against direct
disparagement, we are forced to a special conception of certain groups
of witticisms which seem to occupy themselves with inferior and
powerless persons. I am referring to the marriage-agent stories,—with a
few of which we have become familiar in the investigation of the
manifold techniques of thought-wit. In some of these examples, “But she
is deaf, too!” and “Who in the world would ever lend these people
anything!” the agent was derided as a careless and thoughtless person
who becomes comical because the truth escapes his lips automatically, as
it were. But does on the one hand what we have learned about the nature
of tendency-wit, and on the other hand the amount of satisfaction in
these stories, harmonize with the misery of the persons at whom the joke
seems to be pointed? Are these worthy opponents of the wit? Or, is it
not more plausible to suppose that the wit puts the agent in the
foreground only in order to strike at something more important; does it,
as the saying goes, strike the saddle pack, when it is meant for the
mule? This conception can really not be rejected.
The above-mentioned interpretation of the marriage-agent stories admits
of a continuation. It is true that I need not enter into them, that I
can content myself with seeing the farcical in these stories, and can
dispute their witty character. However, such subjective determination of
wit actually exists. We have now become cognizant of it and shall later
on have to investigate it. It means that only that is a witticism which
I wish to consider as such. What may be wit to me, may be only an
amusing story to another. But if a witticism admits of doubt, that can
be due only to the fact that it is possessed of a show-side,—in our
examples it happens to be a façade of the comic,—upon which one may be
satisfied to bestow a single glance while another may attempt to peep
behind. We also suspect that this façade is intended to dazzle the
prying glance which is to say that such stories have something to
conceal.
At all events, if our marriage-agent stories are witticisms at all, they
are all the better witticisms because, thanks to their façade, they are
in a position to conceal not only what they have to say but also that
they have something—forbidden—to say. But the continuation of the
interpretation, which reveals this hidden part and shows that these
stories having a comical façade are tendency-witticisms, would be as
follows: Every one who allows the truth to escape his lips in an
unguarded moment is really pleased to have rid himself of this thought.
This is a correct and far-reaching psychological insight. Without the
inner assent no one would allow himself to be overpowered by the
automatism which here brings the truth to light.[41] The marriage agent
is thus transformed from a ludicrous personage into an object deserving
of pity and sympathy. How blest must be the man, able at last to
unburden himself of the weight of dissimulation, if he immediately
seizes the first opportunity to shout out the last fragment of truth! As
soon as he sees that his case is lost, that the prospective bride does
not suit the young man, he gladly betrays the secret that the girl has
still another blemish which the young man had overlooked, or he makes
use of the chance to present a conclusive argument in detail in order to
express his contempt for the people who employ him: “Who in the world
would ever lend these people anything!” The ludicrousness of the whole
thing now reverts upon the parents,—hardly mentioned in the story,—who
consider such deceptions justified to clutch a man for their daughter;
it also reflects upon the wretched state of the girls who get married
through such contrivances, and upon the want of dignity of the marriage
contracted after such preliminaries. The agent is the right person to
express such criticisms, for he is best acquainted with these abuses;
but he may not raise his voice, because he is a poor man whose
livelihood depends altogether on turning these abuses to his advantage.
But the same conflict is found in the national spirit which has given
rise to these and similar stories; for he is aware that the holiness of
wedlock suffers severely by reference to some of the methods of
marriage-making.