Scan barcode
A review by outcolder
Jokes and Their Relation to the Unconscious by Sigmund Freud
2.0
My older son says Freud is someone you have to chase out of the kitchen with a broom. That is true, but Freud is also someone who can admit when he doesn't know something and he is someone who solicits criticism and then responds to it. Some of my problems with this book might be the "standard edition" translation which frankly, sucks. In addition to just inventing new English words, using some obscure Greek term instead of doing the work of translating, translating one-to-one so that vorfreude becomes fore-pleasure, everything seems to be unnecessarily complicated so that readers can pat themselves on the back and tell themselves how smart they are. Maybe I am the dumb one, but it seems to me that nothing in this book is that difficult to understand if you just say it in simple language. A lot of it boils down to "insights" like, we laugh because we feel superior to the person being made fun of. He seems also to be saying that there always must be someone being made fun of, "the third person" he calls it, like the other two people are the joke teller and the joke listener. Things like puns or jokes that don't have a target are of a lesser quality, for the notoriously competitive Freud.
A bigger frustration for me is Freud's classism, racism, and general bourgeois baggage. He frequently asserts that the uneducated do not tell proper jokes, they just tell insults. At one point he is harping on this again and he throws in children and "people of other races" as being too primitive to joke, because, he claims, the uncivilized repress less, so they don't need to release their repression in jokes. What the Freud?!
Nowhere does he look at the punching up or punching down side of jokes. He does not consider really the social context of jokes beyond discussing our sympathy for certain characters in the jokes. And then often, his sympathy seems to be with the wrong people, like when discussing a Mark Twain joke where Freud seems to be on the side of the employer so therefore he doesn't think the joke is funny.
You often hear or read that Freud's models are related to steam engines, and that it's all about pressure and release. Freud talks about release so much in this book... and yeah, obviously, laughing is a release, so he is right to talk about that... but... maybe it's the translation... calling it "discharge"... it started to feel like everything for Freud is basically 'blue balls' which of course, isn't real. What if we never released anything from laughter or any of the other Freudian ways to discharge our emotional investments? I am not convinced that this a blockage and that neurosis is the inevitable outcome. Speaking of investments, Freud talks a lot about economy of movement or economy of words, when talking about jokes, as if our souls are all accountants.
There are some things to enjoy about this book, though. Some of the jokes are good. The Viennese world of that Freud-time comes through in some of his anecdotes, his references to Schiller, Heine, various politicians and nobles, or in one of my favorite bits when he says that when we turn on an electric light we remember what a pain in the ass it was to deal with the gas lights. A hundred years later, we can maybe think that Freud is gaslighting us but we have no idea what the freud a gaslight is.
A bigger frustration for me is Freud's classism, racism, and general bourgeois baggage. He frequently asserts that the uneducated do not tell proper jokes, they just tell insults. At one point he is harping on this again and he throws in children and "people of other races" as being too primitive to joke, because, he claims, the uncivilized repress less, so they don't need to release their repression in jokes. What the Freud?!
Nowhere does he look at the punching up or punching down side of jokes. He does not consider really the social context of jokes beyond discussing our sympathy for certain characters in the jokes. And then often, his sympathy seems to be with the wrong people, like when discussing a Mark Twain joke where Freud seems to be on the side of the employer so therefore he doesn't think the joke is funny.
You often hear or read that Freud's models are related to steam engines, and that it's all about pressure and release. Freud talks about release so much in this book... and yeah, obviously, laughing is a release, so he is right to talk about that... but... maybe it's the translation... calling it "discharge"... it started to feel like everything for Freud is basically 'blue balls' which of course, isn't real. What if we never released anything from laughter or any of the other Freudian ways to discharge our emotional investments? I am not convinced that this a blockage and that neurosis is the inevitable outcome. Speaking of investments, Freud talks a lot about economy of movement or economy of words, when talking about jokes, as if our souls are all accountants.
There are some things to enjoy about this book, though. Some of the jokes are good. The Viennese world of that Freud-time comes through in some of his anecdotes, his references to Schiller, Heine, various politicians and nobles, or in one of my favorite bits when he says that when we turn on an electric light we remember what a pain in the ass it was to deal with the gas lights. A hundred years later, we can maybe think that Freud is gaslighting us but we have no idea what the freud a gaslight is.