Part 26

Humor is the most self-sufficient of the forms of the comic; its process consummating itself in one single person and the participation of another adds nothing new to it. I can enjoy the pleasure of humor originating in myself without feeling the necessity of imparting it to another. It is not easy to tell what happens dining the production of humoristic pleasure in a person; but one gains a certain insight by investigating these cases of humor which have emanated from persons with whom we have entered into a sympathetic understanding. By sympathetically understanding the humoristic person in these cases one gets the same pleasure. The coarsest form of humor, the so-called humor of the gallows or grim-humor (Galgenhumor), may enlighten us in this regard. The rogue, on being led to execution on Monday, remarked: “Yes, this week is beginning well.” This is really a witticism, as the remark is quite appropriate in itself, on the other hand it is displaced in the most nonsensical fashion, as there can be no further happening for him this week. But it required humor to make such wit, that is, to overlook what distinguished the beginning of this week from other weeks, and to deny the difference which could give rise to motives for very particular emotional feelings. The case is the same when on the way to the gallows he requests a neckerchief for his bare neck, in order to guard against taking cold, a precaution which would be quite praiseworthy under different circumstances, but becomes exceedingly superfluous and indifferent in view of the impending fate of this same neck. We must say that there is something like greatness of soul in this blague, in this clinging to his usual nature and in deviating from that which would overthrow and drive this nature into despair. This form of grandeur of humor thus appears unmistakably in cases in which our admiration is not inhibited by the circumstances of the humoristic person.

In Victor Hugo’s Ernani the bandit who entered into a conspiracy against his king, Charles I, of Spain, (Charles V, as the German Emperor), falls into the hands of his most powerful enemy; he foresees his fate; as one convicted of high treason his head will fall. But this prospect does not deter him from introducing himself as a hereditary Grandee of Spain and from declaring that he has no intention of waiving any prerogative belonging to such personage. A Grandee of Spain could appear before his royal master with his head covered. Well:

“Nos têtes ont le droit De tomber couvertes devant de toi.”

This is excellent humor and if we do not laugh on hearing it, it is because our admiration covers the humoristic pleasure. In the case of the rogue who did not wish to take cold on the way to the gallows we roar with laughter. The situation which should have driven this criminal to despair, might have evoked in us intense pity, but this pity is inhibited because we understand that he who is most concerned is quite indifferent to the situation. As a result of this understanding the expenditure for pity, which was already prepared in us, became inapplicable and we laughed it off. The indifference of the rogue, which we notice has cost him a great expenditure of psychic labor, infects us as it were.

Economy of sympathy is one of the most frequent sources of humoristic pleasure. Mark Twain’s humor usually follows this mechanism. When he tells us about the life of his brother, how, as mi employee in a large road-building enterprise, he was hurled into the air through a premature explosion of a blast, to come to earth again far from the place where he was working, feelings of sympathy for this unfortunate are invariably aroused in us. We should like to inquire whether he sustained no injury in this accident; but the continuation of the story that the brother lost a half-day’s pay for being away from the place he worked diverts us entirely from sympathy and makes us almost as hard-hearted as that employer, and just as indifferent to the possible injury to the victim’s health. Another time Mark Twain presents us his pedigree, which he traces back almost as far back as one of the companions of Columbus. But after describing the character of this ancestor, whose entire possessions consisted of several pieces of linen each bearing a different mark, we cannot help laughing at the expense of the stored-up piety, a piety which characterized our frame of mind at the beginning of this family history. The mechanism of humoristic pleasure is not disturbed by our knowing that this family history is a fictitious one, and that this fiction serves a satirical tendency to expose the embellishments which result in imparting such pedigrees to others; it is just as independent of the conditions of reality as the manufactured comic. Another of Mark Twain’s stories relates how his brother constructed for himself subterranean quarters into which he brought a bed, a table, and a lamp, and that as a roof he used a large piece of sail-cloth with a hole through the centre; how during the night after the room was completed, a cow being driven home fell through the opening in the ceiling on to the table and extinguished the lamp; how his brother helped patiently to hoist the animal out and to rearrange everything; how he did the same thing when the same disturbance was repeated the following night; and then every succeeding night; such a story becomes comical through repetition. But Mark Twain closes with the information that in the forty-sixth night when the cow again fell through, his brother finally remarked that the thing was beginning to grow monotonous; and here we can no longer restrain our humoristic pleasure, for we had long expected to hear how the brother would express his anger over this chronic malheur. The slight humor which we draw from our own life we usually produce at the expense of anger instead of irritating ourselves.

Forms of Humor

The forms of humor are extraordinarily varied according to the nature of the emotional feelings which are economized in favor of humor, as sympathy, anger, pain, compassion, etc. And this series seems incomplete because the sphere of humor experiences a constant enlargement, as often as an artist or writer succeeds in mastering humoristically the, as yet, unconquered emotional feelings and in making them, through artifices similar to those in the above example, a source of humoristic pleasure. Thus the artists of Simplicissimus have worked wonders in gaining humor at the expense of fear and disgust. The manifestations of humor are above all determined by two peculiarities, which are connected with the conditions of its origin. In the first place, humor may appear fused with wit or any other form of the comic; whereby it is entrusted with the task of removing a possible emotional development which would form a hindrance to the pleasurable effect. Secondly, it can entirely set aside this emotional development or only partially, which is really the more frequent case, because the simpler function and the different forms of “broken” humor, results in that humor which smiles under its tears. It withdraws from the affect a part of its energy and gives instead the accompanying humoristic sound.

As may be noticed by former examples the humoristic pleasure gained by entering into sympathy with a thing results from a special technique resembling displacement through which the liberation of affect held ready is disappointed and the energy occupation is deflected to other, and, not often, to secondary matters. This does not help us, however, to understand the process by which the displacement from the development of affect proceeds in the humoristic person himself. We see that the recipient intimates the producer of the humor in his psychic processes, but we discover nothing thereby concerning the forces which make this process possible in the latter.

We can only say, when, for example, somebody succeeds in paying no heed to a painful affect because he holds before himself the greatness of the world’s interest as a contrast to his own smallness, that we see in this no function of humor but one of philosophic thinking, and we gain no pleasure even if we put ourselves into his train of thought. The humoristic displacement is therefore just as impossible in the light of conscious attention as is the comic comparison; like the latter it is connected with the condition to remain in the foreconscious—that is to say, to remain automatic.

One reaches some solution of humoristic displacement if one examines it in the light of a defense process. The defense processes are the psychic correlates of the flight reflex and follow the task of guarding against the origin of pain from inner sources; in fulfilling this task they serve the psychic function as an automatic adjustment, which finally proves harmful and therefore must be subjected to the control of the conscious thinking. A definite form of this defense, the failure of repression, I have demonstrated as the effective mechanism in the origin of the psychoneuroses. Humor can now be conceived as the loftiest variant of this defense activity. It disdains to withdraw from conscious attention the ideas which are connected with the painful affect, as repression does, and thus it overcomes the defense automatism. It brings this about by finding the means to withdraw the energy resulting from the liberation of pain which is held in readiness and through discharge changes the same into pleasure. It is even credible that it is again the connection with the infantile that puts at humor’s disposal the means for this function. Only in childhood did we experience intensively painful affects over which to-day as grown-ups we would laugh; just as a humorist laughs over his present painful affects. The elevation of his ego, of which humoristic displacement gives evidence,—the translation of which would read: I am too big to have these causes affect me painfully—he could find in the comparison of his present ego with his infantile ego. This conception is to some extent confirmed by the rôle which falls to the infantile in the neurotic processes of repression.

The Relation of Humor to Wit and Comic

On the whole humor is closer to the comic than wit. Like the former its psychic localization is in the foreconscious, whereas wit, as we had to assume, is formed as a compromise between the unconscious and the foreconscious. On the other hand, humor has no share in the peculiar nature in which wit and the comic meet, a peculiarity which perhaps we have not hitherto emphasized strongly enough. It is a condition for the origin of the comic that we be induced to apply—either simultaneously or in rapid succession—to the same thought function two different modes of ideas, between which the “comparison” then takes place and thus forms the comic difference. Such differences originate between the expenditure of the stranger and one’s own, between the usual expenditure and the emergency expenditure, between an anticipated expenditure and one which has already occurred.

The difference between two forms of conception resulting simultaneously, which work with different expenditures, comes into consideration in wit, in respect to the hearer. The one of these two conceptions, by taking the hints contained in the witticism, follows the train of thought through the unconscious, while the other conception remains on the surface and presents the witticism like any wording from the foreconscious which has become conscious. Perhaps it would not be considered an unjustified statement if we should refer the pleasure of the witticism heard to the difference between these two forms of presentation.

Concerning wit we here repeat our former statement concerning its Janus-like double-facedness, a simile we used when the relation between wit and the comic still appeared to us unsettled.

The character thus put into the foreground becomes indistinct when we deal with humor. To be sure, we feel the humoristic pleasure where an emotional feeling is evaded, which we might have expected as a pleasure usually belonging to the situation; and in so far humor really falls under the broadened conception of the comic of expectation. But in humor it is no longer a question of two different kinds of presentations having the same content; the fact that the situation comes under the domination of a painful emotional feeling which should have been avoided, puts an end to possible comparison with the nature in the comic and in wit. The humoristic displacement is really a case of that different kind of utilization of a freed expenditure which proved to be so dangerous for the comic effect.

Formulæ for Wit, Comic, and Humor

Now, that we have reduced the mechanism of humoristic pleasure to a formula analogous to the formula of comic pleasure and of wit, we are at the end of our task. It has seemed to us that the pleasure of wit originates from an economy of expenditure in inhibition, of the comic from an economy of expenditure in thought, and of humor from an economy of expenditure in feeling. All three activities of our psychic apparatus derive pleasure from economy. They all strive to bring back from the psychic activity a pleasure which has really been lost in the development of this activity. For the euphoria which we are thus striving to obtain is nothing but the state of a bygone time in which we were wont to defray our psychic work with slight expenditure. It is the state of our childhood in which we did not know the comic, were incapable of wit, and did not need humor to make us happy.

INDEX

Abstract wit, 128

Absurdity, 77

Actuality, 186

Æsthetics, vi

Agassiz, 54

Aggression, 138, 152, 160, 232

Alluring-premiums, 210

Allusions, 107, 108, 232

Ambiguity, 45

Ambitious impulse, 219