The Joke and Its Relation to the Unconscious by Sigmund Freud

Author:Sigmund Freud [Freud, Sigmund]
Language: eng
Format: epub
ISBN: 9781101644799
Publisher: Penguin Publishing Group
Published: 2003-06-23T16:00:00+00:00

[D]

To the genres of tendentious jokes we have dealt with so far,

jokes that strip naked, or obscene jokes,

aggressive (hostile) jokes,

cynical (critical, blasphemous) jokes,

I should like to add a new one as the fourth and least common, whose characteristics can be illustrated by a good example.

Two Jews meet in a railway carriage at a station in Galicia. ‘Where are you travelling?’ asks the one. ‘To Cracow,’ comes the answer. ‘Look what a liar you are!’ the other protests. ‘When you say you’re going to Cracow, you want me to believe that you’re going to Lemberg. But I know that you’re really going to Cracow. So why are you lying?’

This delicious story, with its impression of extravagant logic-chopping, clearly works by means of the technique of absurdity. The second Jew is to take being upbraided for his lies because he says he is travelling to Cracow – which is in fact his destination! But here, this powerful technical device – absurdity – is coupled with another technique, representation by the opposite, for according to the unspoken assertion of the first Jew, the other is lying when he is telling the truth, and telling the truth with a lie. But the more serious content of this joke is the question of what determines truth. Again, the joke is pointing to a problem and exploiting the uncertainty of one of our most common concepts. Is it truth when we describe things as they are, without bothering about how our listener will understand what we have said? Or is this only a jesuitical truth, and does not genuine truthfulness rather consist in taking the listener into account and conveying to him a true likeness of our own knowledge? I regard jokes of this kind as being sufficiently distinct from the others to be allotted a special position. What they are attacking is not a person or an institution, but the very certainty of our knowledge itself, one of our speculative goods. The name of ‘sceptical’ jokes, then, would be the appropriate one for them.

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