Part 4

At this point our teacher started to laugh again. According to the nomenclature of our authors this is sound-wit and a poor kind at that, since it plays with a proper name.

But what is the technique of this wit? It is quite clear that the character which we had perhaps hoped to demonstrate universally leaves us in the lurch in the first new example. Here there is no omission and scarcely an abbreviation. In the witticism the lady expresses almost everything that we can ascribe to the thoughts. “You have made me look forward to meeting a relative of J. J. Rousseau. I expected that he was perhaps even mentally related to him. Imagine my surprise to find this red-haired foolish boy, a roux et sot.” To be sure, I was able to add and insert something, but this attempt at reduction does not annul the wit. It remains fixed and attached to the sound similarity of

Rousseau. ———————— roux sot

This proves that condensation with substitution plays no part in the production of this witticism.

With what else do we have to deal? New attempts at reduction taught me that the joke will persistently continue until the name Rousseau is replaced by another. If, e.g., I substitute the name Racine for it I find that although the lady’s criticism is just as feasible as before it immediately loses every trace of wit. Now I know where I can look for the technique of this joke although I still hesitate to formulate it. I shall make the following attempt: The technique of the witticism lies in the fact that one and the same word—the name—is used in a twofold application, once as a whole and once divided into its syllables like a charade.

I can mention a few examples of identical technique. A witticism of this sort was utilized by an Italian lady to avenge a tactless remark made to her by the first Napoleon. Pointing to her compatriots at a court ball he said: “Tutti gli Italian danzano si male” (all Italians dance so badly). To which she quickly replied: “Non tutti, ma buona parte” (Not all, but a great many)—

Buona parte. ———————————— Buonaparte.

Brill reports still another example in which the wit depends on the twofold application of a name: “Hood once remarked that he had to be a lively Hood for a livelihood.”

At one time when Antigone was produced in Berlin a critic found that the presentation entirely lacked the character of antiquity. The wits of Berlin incorporated this criticism in the following manner: “Antique? Oh, nay” (Th. Vischer and K. Fischer).

Manifold Application of the Same Material

In these examples, which will suffice for this species of wit, the technique is the same. A name is made use of twice; first, as a whole, and then divided into its syllables—and in their divided state the syllables yield a different meaning. The manifold application of the same word, once as a whole and then as the component syllables into which it divides itself, was the first case that came to our attention in which technique deviated from that of condensation. Upon brief reflection, however, we must divine from the abundance of examples that come to us that the newly discovered technique can hardly be limited to this single means. Obviously there are any number of hitherto unobserved possibilities for one to utilize the same word or the same material of words in manifold application in one sentence. May not all these possibilities furnish technical means for wit? It would seem so, judging by the following examples.

“Two witty statesmen, X and Y, met at a dinner. X, acting as toastmaster, introduced Y as follows: ‘My friend, Y, is a very wonderful man. All you have to do is to open his mouth, put in a dinner, and a speech appears, etc.’ Responding to the speaker, Y said: ‘My friend, the toastmaster, told you what a wonderful man I am, that all you have to do is to open my mouth, put in a dinner, and a speech appears. Now let me tell you what a wonderful man he is. All you have to do is open anybody’s mouth, put in his speech, and the dinner appears.’”

In examples of this sort, one can use the same material of words and simply change slightly their order. The slighter the change, the more one gets the impression that different sense was expressed with the same words, the better is the technical means of wit. And how simple are the means of its production! “Put in a dinner and a speech appears—put in a speech and a dinner appears.” This is really nothing but an exchange of places of these two phrases whereby what was said of Y becomes differentiated from what is said of X. To be sure, this is not the whole technique of the joke.

Great latitude is afforded the technique of wit if one so extends the “manifold application of the same material” that the word—or the words—upon which the wit depends may be used first unchanged and then with a slight modification. An example is another joke of Mr. N. He heard a gentleman, who himself was born a Jew, utter a malicious statement about Jewish character. “Mr. Councilor,” said he, “I am familiar with your antesemitism, but your antisemitism is new to me.”

Here only one single letter is changed, the modification of which could hardly be noticed in careless pronunciation. This example reminds one of the other modification jokes of Mr. N., but it differs from them in lacking the condensation. Everything that was to be said has been told in the joke. “I know that you yourself were formerly a Jew, therefore I am surprised that you should rail against the Jew.”

An excellent example of such wit modification is also the familiar exclamation: “Traduttore—Traditore.”

The similarity between the two words, almost approaching identity, results in a very impressive representation of the inevitability by which a translator becomes a transgressor—in the eyes of the author.

The manifoldness of slight modifications possible in these jokes is so great that none is quite similar to the other. Here is a joke which is supposed to have arisen at an examination for the degree of law. The candidate was translating a passage from the Corpus juris, “Labeo ait.” “‘I fall (fail),’ says he,” volunteered the candidate. “‘You fall (fail),’ says I,” replied the examiner and the examination ended. Whoever mistakes the name of the celebrated Jurist for a word to which he attaches a false meaning certainly deserves nothing better. But the technique of the witticism lies in the fact that the examiner used almost the same words in punishing the applicant which the latter used to prove his ignorance. Besides, the joke is an example of repartee whose technique, as we shall see, is closely allied to the one just mentioned.

Words are plastic and may be moulded into almost any shape. There are some words which have lost their true original meaning in certain usages which they still enjoy in other applications. In one of Lichtenberg’s jokes just those conditions have been sought for in which the nuances of the wordings have removed their basic meaning.

“How goes it?” asked the blind of the lame one. “As you see,” replied the lame one to the blind.

Language is replete with words which taken in one sense are full of meaning and in another are colorless. There may be two different derivatives from the same root, one of which may develop into a word with a full meaning while the other may become a colorless suffix or prefix, and yet both may have the same sound. The similarity of sound between a word having full meaning and one whose meaning is colorless may also be accidental. In both cases the technique of wit can make use of such relationship of the speech material. The following examples illustrate some of these points.

“Do you call a man kind who remits nothing to his family while away?” asked an actor. “Call that kindness?” “Yes, unremitting kindness,” was the reply of Douglas Jerrold. The wit here depends on the first syllable un of the word unremitting. Un is usually a prefix denoting “not,” but by adding it to “remitting” a new relationship is unexpectedly established which changes the meaning of the context. “An undertaker is one who always carries out what he undertakes.” The striking character upon which the wit here depends is the manifold application of the words undertaker and carry out. Undertaker commonly denotes one who manages funerals. Only when taken in this sense and using the words carry out literally is the sentence witty. The wit lies in the manifold application of the same words.

Double Meaning and Play on Words

If we delve more deeply into the variety of “manifold application” of the same word we suddenly notice that we are confronted with forms of “double meaning” or “plays on words” which have been known a long time and which are universally acknowledged as belonging to the technique of wit. Then why have we bothered our brains about discovering something new when we could just as well have gleaned it from the most superficial treatise on wit? We can say in self-defense only that we are presenting another side of the same phenomena of verbal expressions. What the authors call the “playful” character of wit we treat from the point of view of “manifold application.”

Further examples of manifold application which may also be designated under a new and third group, the class of double meaning, may be divided into subdivisions. These, to be sure, are not essentially differentiated from one another any more than the whole third group from the second. In the first place we have:

(a) Cases of double meaning of a name and its verbal significance: e.g., “Discharge thyself of our company, Pistol” (Henry IV, Act II). “For Suffolk’s duke may he suffocate” (Henry IV, Act I). Heine says, “Here in Hamburg rules not the rascally Macbeth, but Banko (Banquo).”

In those cases where the unchanged name cannot be used,—one might say “misused,”—one can get a double meaning by means of familiar slight modifications: “Why have the French rejected Lohengrin?” was a question asked some time ago. The answer was, “On Elsa’s (Alsace) account.”

(b) Cases where a double meaning is obtained by using a word which has both a verbal and metaphoric sense furnish an abundant source for the technique of wit. A medical colleague, who was well known for his wit, once said to Arthur Schnitzler, the writer: “I am not at all surprised that you became a great poet. Your father had already held up the mirror to his contemporaries.” The mirror used by the father of the writer, the famous Dr. Schnitzler, was the laryngoscope. According to the well-known quotation from Hamlet (Act III, Scene 2), the object of the play as well as the writer who creates it is to “hold, as’t were, the mirror up to nature; to show virtue her own feature, scorn her own image, and the very age and body of the time his form and pressure.”