Part 13

It is obvious that both of the last comparisons possess a character which one cannot find in all good, i.e., fitting, comparisons. One might say that they are in a large manner “debasing,” for they place a thing of high category, an abstraction (good-breeding, patience), side by side with a thing of a very concrete nature of a very low kind (pants). Whether this peculiarity has something to do with wit we shall have to consider in another connection. Let us attempt to analyze another example in which the degrading character is exceptionally well defined. In Nestroy’s farce “Einen Jux will er sich machen,” the clerk, Weinberl, who resolves in his imagination how he will ponder over his youth when he has some day become a well-established old merchant, says: “When in the course of confidential conversation the ice is chopped up before the warehouse of memory; when the portal of the storehouse of antiquity is unlocked again; and when the mattings of phantasy are stocked full with wares of yore.” These are certainly comparisons of abstractions with very common, concrete things, but the witticism depends—exclusively or only partially—upon the circumstance that a clerk makes use of these comparisons which are taken from the sphere of his daily occupation. But to bring the abstract in relation to the commonplace with which he is otherwise filled is an act of unification. Let us revert to Lichtenberg’s comparisons.

Peculiar Attributions

“The motives for our actions may be arranged like the thirty-two winds, and their names may be classified in a similar way, e.g., Bread-bread-glory or Glory-glory-bread.”

As so often happens in Lichtenberg’s witticisms, in this case, too, the impression of appropriateness, cleverness, and ingenuity is so marked that our judgment of the character of the witty element is thereby misled. If something witty is intermingled in such an utterance with the excellent sense, we probably are deluded into declaring the whole to be an exceptional joke. Moreover, I dare say that everything that is really witty about it results from the strangeness of the peculiar combination bread-bread-glory. Thus as far as wit is concerned it is representation through absurdity.

The peculiar combination or absurd attribution can alone be represented as a product of a comparison.

Lichtenberg says: “A twice-sleepy woman—a once-sleepy church pew.” Behind each one there is a comparison with a bed; in both cases there is besides the comparison also the technical factor of allusion. Once it is an allusion to the soporific effect of sermons, and the second time to the inexhaustible theme of sex.

Having found hitherto that a comparison as often as it appears witty owes this impression to its connection with one of the techniques of wit known to us, there are nevertheless some other examples which seem to point to the fact that a comparison as such can also be witty.

This is Lichtenberg’s characteristic remark about certain odes. “They are in poetry what Jacob Böhm’s immortal writings are in prose—they are a kind of picnic in which the author supplies the words, and the readers the meaning.”

“When he philosophizes, he generally sheds an agreeable moonlight over his topics, which is in the main quite pleasant, but which does not show any one subject clearly.”

Again, Heine’s description: “Her face resembled a kodex palimpsestus, where under the new block-lettered text of a church father peek forth the half-obliterated verses of an ancient Hellenic erotic poet.”

Or, the continued comparison of a very degrading tendency, in the “Bäder von Lucca.”

“The Catholic priest is more like a clerk who is employed in a big business; the church, the big house at the head of which is the Pope, gives him a definite salary. He works lazily like one who is not working on his own account, he has many colleagues, and so easily remains unnoticed in the big business enterprise. He is concerned only in the credit of the house and still more in its preservation, since he would be deprived of his means of sustenance in case it went bankrupt. The Protestant clergyman, on the other hand, is his own boss, and carries on the religious businesses on his own account. He has no wholesale trade like his Catholic brother-tradesman, but deals merely at retail; and since he himself must understand it, he cannot be lazy. He must praise his articles of faith to the people and must disparage the articles of his competitors. Like a true small trader he stands in his retail store, full of envy of the industry of all large houses, particularly the large house in Rome which has so many thousand bookkeepers and packers on its payroll, and which owns factories in all four corners of the world.”

In the face of this, as in many other examples, we can no longer dispute the fact that a comparison may in itself be witty, and that the witty impression need not necessarily depend on one of the known techniques of wit. But we are entirely in the dark as to what determines the witty character of the comparison, since it certainly does not cling to the similarity as a form of expression of the thought, or to the operation of the comparison. We can do nothing but include comparison with the different forms of “indirect representation” which are at the disposal of the technique of wit, and the problem, which confronted us more distinctly in the mechanism of comparison than in the means of wit hitherto treated, must remain unsolved. There must surely be a special reason why the decision whether something is a witticism or not presents more difficulties in cases of comparison than in other forms of expression.

This gap in our understanding, however, offers no ground for complaint that our first investigation has been unsuccessful. Considering the intimate connection which we had to be prepared to ascribe to the different types of wit, it would have been imprudent to expect that we could fully explain this aspect of the problem before we had cast a glance over the others. We shall have to take up this problem at another place.

Review of the Techniques of Wit

Are we sure that none of the possible techniques of wit has escaped our investigation? Not exactly; but by a continued examination of new material, we can convince ourselves that we have become acquainted with the most numerous and most important technical means of wit-work—at least with as much as is necessary for formulating a judgment about the nature of this psychic process. At present no such judgment exists; on the other hand, we have come into possession of important indications, from the direction of which we may expect a further explanation of the problem. The interesting processes of condensation with substitutive formation, which we have recognized as the nucleus of the technique of word-wit, directed our attention to the dream-formation in whose mechanism the identical psychic processes were discovered. Thither also we are directed by the technique of the thought-wit, namely displacement, faulty thinking, absurdity, indirect expression, and representation through the opposite—each and all are also found in the technique of dreams. The dream is indebted to displacement for its strange appearance, which hinders us from recognizing in it the continuation of our waking thoughts; the dream’s use of absurdity and contradiction has cost it the dignity of a psychic product, and has misled the authors to assume that the determinants of dream-formation are: collapse of mental activity, cessation of criticism, morality, and logic. Representation through the opposite is so common in dreams that even the popular but entirely misleading books on dream interpretation usually put it to good account. Indirect expression, the substitution for the dream-thought by an allusion, by a trifle or by a symbolism analogous to comparison, is just exactly what distinguishes the manner of expression of the dream from our waking thoughts. Such a far-reaching agreement as found between the means of wit-work and those of dream-work can scarcely be accidental. To show those agreements in detail and to trace their motivations will be one of our future tasks.

III THE TENDENCIES OF WIT

Near the end of the preceding chapter as I was writing down Heine’s comparison of the Catholic priest to an employee of a large business house, and the comparison of the Protestant divine to an independent retail dealer, I felt an inhibition which nearly prevented me from using this comparison. I said to myself that among my readers probably there would be some who hold in veneration not only religion, but also its administration and administrators. These readers might take offense at the comparison and get so wrought up about it that it would take away all interest in the investigation as to whether the comparison seemed witty in itself or was witty only through its garnishings. In other examples, e.g., the one mentioned above concerning the agreeable moonlight shed by a certain philosophy, there would be no worry that for some readers it might be a disturbing influence in our investigation. Even the most religious person would remain in the right mood to form a judgment about our problem.

It is easy to guess the character of the witticism by the kind of reaction that wit exerts on the hearer. Sometimes wit is wit for its own sake and serves no other particular purpose; then again, it places itself at the service of such a purpose, i.e., it becomes purposive. Only that form of wit which has such a tendency runs the risk of ruffling people who do not wish to hear it.

Theo. Vischer called wit without a tendency “abstract” wit, I prefer to call it “harmless” wit.

As we have already classified wit according to the material touched by its technique into word- and thought-wit, it is incumbent upon us to investigate the relation of this classification to the one just put forward. Word- and thought-wit on the one hand, and abstract- and tendency-wit on the other hand, bear no relation of dependence to each other; they are two entirely independent classifications of witty productions. Perhaps some one may have gotten the impression that harmless witticisms are preponderately word-witticisms, whereas the complicated techniques of thought-witticisms are mostly made to serve strong tendencies. There are harmless witticisms that operate through play on words and sound similarity, and just as harmless ones which make use of all means of thought-wit. Nor is it less easy to prove that tendency-wit as far as technique is concerned may be merely the wit of words. Thus, for example, witticisms that “play” with proper names often show an insulting and offending tendency, and yet they, too, belong to word-wit. Again, the most harmless of all jests are word-witticisms. Examples of this nature are the popular “shake-up” rhymes (Schüttelreime) in which the technique is represented through the manifold application of the same material with a very peculiar modification:

“Having been forsaken by Dame Luck, he degenerated into a Lame Duck.”

Let us hope that no one will deny that the pleasure experienced in this kind of otherwise unpretentious rhyming is of the same nature as the one by which we recognize wit.

Good examples of abstract or harmless thought-witticisms abound in Lichtenberg’s comparisons with which we have already become acquainted. I add a few more. “They sent a small Octavo to the University of Göttingen; and received back in body and soul a quarto” (a fourth-form boy).

“In order to erect this budding well, one must lay above all things a good foundation, and I know of no firmer than by laying immediately over every pro-layer a contra-layer.”

“One man begets the thought, the second acts as its godfather, the third begets children by it, the fourth visits it on its death-bed, and the fifth buries it” (comparison with unification).

“Not only did he disbelieve in ghosts, but he was not ever afraid of them.” The witticism in this case lies exclusively in the absurd representation which puts what is usually considered less important in the comparative and what is considered more important in the positive degree. If we divest it of its dress it says: it is much easier to use our reason and make light of the fear of ghosts than to defend ourselves against this fear when the occasion presents itself. But this rendering is no longer witty; it is merely a correct and still too little respected psychological fact suggesting what Lessing expresses in his well-known words:

“Not all are free who mock their chains.”