though still hypothetical, strictly speaking, ends our interest in wit.
There still remains a short comparison of wit to the more familiar dream
and we may expect that, outside of the one agreement already considered,
two such diverse mental activities should show nothing but differences.
The most important difference lies in their social behavior. The dream
is a perfectly asocial psychic product. It has nothing to tell to anyone
else, having originated in an individual as a compromise between
conflicting psychic forces it remains incomprehensible to the person
himself and has therefore altogether no interest for anybody else. Not
only does the dream find it unnecessary to place any value on
intelligibleness, but it must even guard against being understood, as it
would then be destroyed; it can only exist in disguised form. For this
reason the dream may make use freely of the mechanism that controls
unconscious thought processes to the extent of producing undecipherable
disfigurements. Wit, on the other hand, is the most social of all those
psychic functions whose aim is to gain pleasure. It often requires three
persons, and the psychic process which it incites always requires the
participation of at least one other person. It must therefore bind
itself to the condition of intelligibleness; it may employ disfigurement
made practicable in the unconscious through condensation and
displacement, to no greater extent than can be deciphered by the
intelligence of the third person. As for the rest, wit and dreams have
developed in altogether different spheres of the psychic life, and are
to be classed under widely separated categories of the psychological
system. No matter how concealed the dream is still a wish, while wit is
a developed play. Despite its apparent unreality the dream retains its
relation to the great interests of life; it seeks to supply what is
lacking through a regressive detour of hallucinations; and it owes its
existence solely to the strong need for sleep during the night. Wit, on
the other hand, seeks to draw a small amount of pleasure from the free
and unencumbered activities of our psychic apparatus, and later to seize
this pleasure as an incidental gain. It thus _secondarily_ reaches to
important functions relative to the outer world. The dream serves
preponderately to guard from pain while wit serves to acquire pleasure;
in these two aims all our psychic activities meet.
VII
WIT AND THE VARIOUS FORMS OF THE COMIC
We have approached the problems of the comic in an unusual manner. It
appeared to us that wit, which is usually regarded as a subspecies of
the comic, offered enough peculiarities to warrant our taking it
directly under consideration, and thus it came about that we avoided
discussing its relation to the more comprehensive category of the comic
as long as it was possible to do so, yet we did not proceed without
picking up on the way some hints that might be valuable for studying the
comic. We found it easy to ascertain that the comic differs from wit in
its social behavior. The comic can be content with only two persons, one
who finds the comical, and one in whom it is found. The third person to
whom the comical may be imparted reinforces the comic process, but adds
nothing new to it. In wit, however, this third person is indispensable
for the completion of the pleasure-bearing process, while the second
person may be omitted, especially when it is not a question of
aggressive wit with a tendency. Wit is made, while the comical is found;
it is found first of all in persons, and only later by transference may
be seen also in objects, situations, and the like. We know, too, in the
case of wit that it is not strange persons, but one’s own mental
processes that contain the sources for the production of pleasure. In
addition we have heard that wit occasionally reopens inaccessible
sources of the comic, and that the comic often serves wit as a façade to
replace the fore-pleasure usually produced by the well-known technique
(p. 236). All of this does not really point to a very simple
relationship between wit and the comic. On the other hand, the problems
of the comic have shown themselves to be so complicated, and have until
now so successfully defied all attempts made by the philosophers to
solve them, that we have not been able to justify the expectation of
mastering it by a sudden stroke, so to speak, even if we approach it
along the paths of wit. Incidentally we came provided with an instrument
for investigating wit that had not yet been made use of by others;
namely, the knowledge of dream-work. We have no similar advantage at our
disposal for comprehending the comic, and we may therefore expect that
we shall learn nothing about the nature of the comic other than that
which we have already become aware of in wit; in so far as wit belongs
to the comic and retains certain features of the same unchanged or
modified in its own nature.
_The Naïve_
The species of the comic that is most closely allied to wit is the
_naïve_. Like the comic the naïve is found universally and is not made
like in the case of wit. The naïve cannot be made at all, while in the
case of the pure comic the question of making or evoking the comical may
be taken into account. The naïve must result without our intervention
from the speech and actions of other persons who take the place of the
_second_ person in the comic or in wit. The naïve originates when one
puts himself completely outside of inhibition, because it does not exist
for him; that is, if he seems to overcome it without any effort. What
conditions the function of the naïve is the fact that we are aware that
the person does not possess this inhibition, otherwise we should not
call it naïve but impudent, and instead of laughing we should be
indignant. The effect of the naïve, which is irresistible, seems easy to
understand. An expenditure of that inhibition energy which is commonly
already formed in us suddenly becomes inapplicable when we hear the
naïve and is discharged through laughter; as the removal of the
inhibition is direct, and not the result of an incited operation, there
is no need for a suspension of attention. We behave like the hearer in
wit, to whom the economy of inhibition is given without any effort on
his part.
In view of the understanding about the genesis of inhibitions which we
obtained while tracing the development of play into wit, it will not
surprise us to learn that the naïve is mostly found in children,
although it may also be observed in uneducated adults, whom we look on
as children as far as their intellectual development is concerned. For
the purposes of comparison with wit, naïve speech is naturally better
adapted than naïve actions, for speech and not actions are the usual
forms of expression employed by wit. It is significant, however, that
naïve speeches, such as those of children, can without straining also be
designated as “naïve witticisms.” The points of agreement as well as
demonstration between wit and naïveté will become clear to us upon
consideration of a few examples.[66]
_A little girl of three years was accustomed to hear from her German
nurse the exclamatory word “Gesundheit” (God bless you!; literally, may
you be healthy!) whenever she happened to sneeze. While suffering from a
severe cold during which the profuse coughing and sneezing caused her
considerable pain, she pointed to her chest and said to her father,
“Daddy, Gesundheit hurts.”_
_Another little girl of four years heard her parents refer to a Jewish
acquaintance as a Hebrew, and on later hearing the latter’s wife
referred to as Mrs. X, she corrected her mother, saying, “No, that is
not her name; if her husband is a Hebrew she is a Shebrew.”_
In the first example the wit is produced through the use of a contiguous
association in the form of an abstract thought for the concrete action.
The child so often heard the word “Gesundheit” associated with sneezing
that she took it for the act itself. While the second example may be
designated as word-wit formed by the technique of sound similarity. The
child divided the word Hebrew into He-brew and having been taught the
genders of the personal pronouns, she naturally imagined that if the man
is a He-brew his wife must be a She-brew. Both examples could have
originated as real witticisms upon which we would have unwillingly
bestowed a little mild laughter. But as examples of naïveté they seem
excellent and cause loud laughter. But what is it here that produces the
difference between wit and naïveté? Apparently it is neither the wording
nor the technique, which is the same for both wit and the naïve, but a
factor which at first sight seems remote from both. It is simply a
question whether we assume that the speakers had the intention of making
a witticism or whether we assume that they—the children—wished to draw
an earnest conclusion, a conclusion held in good faith though based on
uncorrected knowledge. Only the latter case is one of naïveté. It is
here that our attention is first called to the mechanism in which the
second person places himself into the psychic process of the person who
produces the wit.
The investigation of a third example will confirm this opinion. A
brother and a sister, the former ten and the latter twelve years old,
produce a play of their own composition before an audience of uncles and
aunts. The scene represents a hut on the seashore. In the first act the
two dramatist-actors, a poor fisherman and his devoted wife, complain
about the hard times and the difficulty of getting a livelihood. The man
decides to sail over the wide ocean in his boat in order to seek wealth
elsewhere, and after a touching farewell the curtain is drawn. The
second act takes place several years later. The fisherman has come home
rich with a big bag of money and tells his wife, whom he finds waiting
in front of the hut, what good luck he has had in the far countries. His
wife interrupts him proudly, saying: “Nor have I been idle in the
meanwhile,” and opens the hut, on whose floor the fisherman sees twelve
large dolls representing children asleep. At this point of the drama the
performers were interrupted by an outburst of laughter on the part of
the audience, a thing which they could not understand. They stared
dumfounded at their dear relatives, who had thus far behaved respectably
and had listened attentively. The explanation of this laughter lies in
the assumption on the part of the audience that the young dramatists
know nothing as yet about the origin of children, and were therefore in
a position to believe that a wife would actually boast of bearing
offspring during the prolonged absence of her husband, and that the
husband would rejoice with her over it. But the results achieved by the
dramatists on the basis of this ignorance may be designated as nonsense
or absurdity.
These examples show that the naïve occupies a position midway between
wit and the comic. As far as wording and contents are concerned, the
naïve speech is identical with wit; it produces a misuse of words, a bit
of nonsense, or an obscenity. But the psychic process of the first
person or producer which, in the case of wit, offered us so much that
was interesting and puzzling, is here entirely absent. The naïve person
imagines that he is using his thoughts and expressions in a simple and
normal manner; he has no other purpose in view, and receives no pleasure
from his naïve production. All the characteristics of the naïve lie in
the conception of the hearer, who corresponds to the third person in the
case of wit. The producing person creates the naïve without any effort.
The complicated technique, which in wit serves to paralyze the
inhibition produced by the critical reason, does not exist here, because
the person does not possess this inhibition, and he can therefore
readily produce the senseless and the obscene without any compromise.
The naïve may be added to the realm of wit if it comes into existence
after the important function of the censor, as observed in the formula
for wit-formation, has been reduced to zero.
If the affective determination of wit consists in the fact that both
persons should be subject to about the same inhibitions or inner
resistances, we may say now that the determination of the naïve consists
in the fact that one person should have inhibitions which the other
lacks. It is the person provided with inhibitions who understands the
naïve, and it is he alone who gains the pleasure produced by the naïve.
We can easily understand that this pleasure is due to the removal of
inhibitions. Since the pleasure of wit is of the same origin—a kernel of
word-pleasure and nonsense-pleasure, and a shell of removal- and
release-pleasure,—the similarity of this connection to the inhibition
thus determines the inner relationship between the naïve and wit. In
both cases pleasure results from the removal of inner inhibitions. But
the psychic process of the recipient person (which in the naïve
regularly corresponds with our ego, whereas in wit we may also put
ourselves in place of the producing person) is by as much more
complicated in the case of the naïve as it is simpler in the producing
person in wit. For one thing, the naïve must produce the same effect
upon the receiving person as wit does, this may be fully confirmed by
our examples, for just as in wit the removal of the censor has been made
possible by the mere effort of hearing the naïve. But only a part of the
pleasure created by the naïve admits of this explanation, in other cases
of naïve utterances, even this portion would be endangered, as, for
example, while listening to naïve obscenities. We would react to a naïve
obscenity with the same indignation felt toward a real obscenity, were
it not for the fact that another factor saves us from this indignation
and at the same time furnishes the more important part of the pleasure
derived from the naïve.
This other factor is the result of the condition mentioned before,
namely, that in order to recognize the naïve we have to be cognizant of
the fact that there are no inner inhibitions in the producing person. It
is only when this is assured that we laugh instead of being indignant.
Hence we take into consideration the psychic state of the producing
person; we imagine ourselves in this same psychic state and endeavor to
understand it by comparing it to our own. This putting ourselves into
the psychic state of the producing person and comparing it with our own
results in an economy of expenditure which we discharge through
laughing.
We might prefer the simpler explanation, namely, that when we reflect
that the person has no inhibition to overcome our indignation becomes
superfluous; the laughing therefore results at the cost of economized
indignation. In order to avoid this conception, which is, in general,
misleading, I shall distinguish more sharply between two cases that I
had treated as one in the above discussion. The naïve, as it appears to
us, may either be in the nature of a witticism, as in our example, or an
obscenity, or of anything generally objectionable; which becomes
especially evident if the naïve is expressed not in speech but in
action. This latter case is really misleading; for it might lead one to
assume that the pleasure originated from the economized and transformed
indignation. The first case is the illuminating one. The naïve speech in
the example “Hebrew” can produce the effect of a light witticism and
give no cause for indignation; it is certainly the more rare, or the
more pure and by far the more instructive case. In so far as we think
that the child took the syllable “he” in “Hebrew” seriously, and without
any additional reason identified it with the masculine personal pronoun,
the increase in pleasure as a result of hearing it has no longer
anything to do with the pleasure of the wit. We shall now consider what
has been said from two viewpoints, first how it came into existence in
the mind of the child, and secondly, how it would occur to us. In
following this comparison we find that the child has discovered an
identity and has overcome barriers which exist in us, and by continuing
still further it may express itself as follows: “If you wish to
understand what you have heard, you may save yourself the expenditure
necessary for holding these barriers in place.” The expenditure which
became freed by this comparison is the source of pleasure in the naïve,
and is discharged through laughter; to be sure, it is the same
expenditure which we would have converted into indignation if our
understanding of the producing person, and in this case the nature of
his utterance, had not precluded it. But if we take the case of the
naïve joke as a model for the second case, viz., the objectionable
naïve, we shall see that here, too, the economy in inhibition may
originate directly from the comparison. That is, it is unnecessary for
us to assume an incipient and then a strangulated indignation, an
indignation corresponding to a different application of the freed
expenditure, against which, in the case of wit, complicated defensive
mechanisms were required.
_Source of Comic Pleasure in the Naïve_
This comparison and this economy of expenditure that occur as the result
of putting one’s self into the psychic process of the producing person
can have an important bearing on the naïve only if they do not belong to
the naïve alone. As a matter of fact we suspect that this mechanism
which is so completely foreign to wit is a part—perhaps the essential
part—of the psychic process of the comic. This aspect—it is perhaps the
most important aspect of the naïve—thus represents the naïve as a form
of the comic. Whatever is added to the wit-pleasure by the naïve
speeches in our examples is “comical” pleasure. Concerning the latter we
might be inclined to make a general assumption that this pleasure
originates through an economized expenditure by comparing the utterance
of some one else with our own. But since we are here in the presence of
very broad views we shall first conclude our consideration of the naïve.
The naïve would thus be a form of the comic, in so far as its pleasure
originates from the difference in expenditure which results in our
effort to understand the other person; and it resembles wit through the
condition that the expenditure saved by the comparison must be an
inhibition expenditure.[67]
Before concluding we shall rapidly point out a few agreements and
differences between the conceptions at which we have just arrived and
those that have been known for a long time in the psychology of the
comic. The putting one’s self into the psychic process of another and
the desire to understand him is obviously nothing else than the “comic
burrowing” (_komisches Leihen_) which has played a part in the analysis
of the comic ever since the time of Jean Paul; the “comparing” of the
psychic process of another with our own corresponds to a “psychological
contrast,” for which we here at last find a place, after we did not know
what to do with it in wit. But in our explanation of comic pleasure we
take issue with many authors who contend that this pleasure originates
through the fluctuation of our attention to and fro between contrasting
ideas. We are unable to see how such a mechanism could produce pleasure,
and we point to the fact that in the comparing of contrasts there
results a difference in expenditure which, if not used for anything
else, becomes capable of discharge and hence a source of pleasure.[68]
It is with misgiving only that we approach the problem of the comic. It
would be presumptuous to expect from our efforts any decisive
contribution to the solution of this problem after the works of a large
number of excellent thinkers have not resulted in an explanation that is
in every respect satisfactory. As a matter of fact, we intend simply to
follow out into the province of the comic certain observations that have
been found valuable in the study of wit.
_Occurrence and Origin of the Comic_
The comical appears primarily as an unintentional discovery in the
social relations of human beings. It is found in persons, that is, in
their movements, shapes, actions, and characteristic traits. In the
beginning it is found probably only in their psychical peculiarities and
later on in their mental qualities, especially in the expression of
these latter. Even animals and inanimate objects become comical as the
result of a widely used method of personification. However, the comical
can be considered apart from the person in whom it is found, if the
conditions under which a person becomes comical can be discerned. Thus
arises the comical situation, and this knowledge enables us to make a
person comical at will by putting him into situations in which the
conditions necessary for the comic are bound up with his actions. The
discovery that it is in our power to make another person comical opens
the way to unsuspected gains in comic pleasure, and forms the foundation
of a highly developed technique. It is also possible to make one’s self
just as comical as others. The means which serve to make a person
comical are transference into comic situations, imitations, disguise,
unmasking, caricature, parody, travesty, and the like. It is quite
evident that these techniques may enter into the service of hostile or
aggressive tendencies. A person may be made comical in order to render
him contemptible or in order to deprive him of his claims to dignity and
authority. But even if such a purpose were regularly at the bottom of
all attempts to make a person comical this need not necessarily be the
meaning of the spontaneous comic.