Joke-Work: Freud and Douglas Adams

“Let's think the unthinkable, let's do the undoable, let's prepare to grapple with the ineffable itself, and see if we may not eff it after all.” –Douglas Adams

I had to start with Adams. No one more clever, but also, I think the compass from which he operated totally fits the ongoing project of this blog. His famous pro-science stance in combination with that arresting wit is evidence that we can totally scrutinize humor as closely to its origins as we can crouch without losing all perspective on what’s funny. It’s like how examining the supposed mysteries of our universe’s origins from an atheist standpoint can yet be a transcendent and inspiring experience!!! It might not be like that, but I was obviously determined to force relevance upon the above quotation. Because it’s boss. I seem boss by association, you’re probably noticing right now.

There was a time not long ago when I was going to earn a doctorate and make my living analyzing humor. GERMAN humor. You could argue that this quixotic choice of a research interest was an early sign that I somehow knew I wouldn’t finish my Ph.D. We should talk another time about cultural impact on humor, but even speaking superculturally (absolutely not a word), has anyone ever satisfactorily explained why a joke works? I did a lot of reading about this with the desperation of a person attempting to salvage her career dreams and my answer is still no. I spent that last year of grad school clinging to rafts of material providing mesmerizing descriptions of why people produce humor and how humor gets enacted: context, performance, word choice, etc. What makes us laugh, though? Nobody had nothin’ for me. In fact, I’m inadvertently kind of mimicking the way most articles or essays on the comic would begin—“Sure, we all love a good yuck, but what, indeed whhhhat, causes that laughter (Henry Higgins-like overemphasis of the H-sound mine)?” I failed to find out.

Freud was closest. I realize that that name is attached to all sorts of associations you may resent, probably for sturdy, unassailable reasons. But check this out because I’ve never gotten it out of my head: after he published his Interpretations of Dreams in 1899, a friend wrote to him and pointed out that Freud’s theory about dream-function could apply to any number of mental mechanisms, like how jokes work on us, for instance. “Huh,” Freud said, and then published another book in 1905 called “Jokes and Their Relation to the Unconscious”. You’ll remember that his conception of dream-work went like this, and please do pardon my paraphrastic B.S.: you’ve got all these desires and responses that, if you expressed them to others or perhaps even to yourself, would be socially or emotionally disruptive. So you repress them and they submit to chilling in your unconscious mind for a while. However, their relegation does not sit well. They get restless and yearn to keep it real in your conscious mind. Psychic tension ensues—I could explain it in terms of the interaction of id, ego and superego but frankly I’ve always found it exhausting and distracting to keep those fellas and their tendencies straight. Your repressed desires emerge in your dreams in disguise and thereby attain a conscious manifestation that doesn’t bother anyone too much. Thanks, brain! Hope no Moravian cokeheads come along to extract meaning from your neatly encoded farce!

Freud went on to write about joke-work as a similar process during which your conscious and unconscious minds interact: you’re listening to a joke. Narrative, narrative, lalala…now for the punchline. An unexpected moment interrupts the narrative and subverts your expectations and you’re laughing, or at least acknowledging in some way that laughter would be customary at that stage (buh, no one even says “midget” anymore). Freud claimed that in that moment, your mind responds to this narrative upset by slipping into your unconscious in order to span this absurdity. It’s not our logical, intellectual facility that brings forth that understanding of and reaction to what’s funny—it’s in our capacity to bring forth the unexpected from the unformed. And that act of releasing energy into a structure that’s silly is joyful for us. Says Freud.

No way of proving this but something about it gets me. The spirit of it feels right, and powerful—instead of our psyches expressing some urgent consideration in the dark, we access feeling by giving one another catharsis—and ourselves, too. He also wrote that the joke-work is not complete until we turn around and tell the joke to someone else—it’s social! Kickass, right? I’m sure he’d say that sometimes we substitute a fantasy of telling the joke to someone else...though honestly, if I hear a decent joke, I’m telling it to the next person I see. You nailed me this time, Sigismund.

Part of why I like this is that it does connect to the spirit of Adams I was grasping at before. The wonder one can derive from a (semi-, I know) scientific explanation. The human spark that mingles with the measurable, insensate processes from which we benefit. Doesn’t a great joke feel like a reminder of who we are? Makes the mutual agreement between me and my former university that I’m not cut out to be a professor seem pretty insignificant.

Self-deprecation aside, humor has challenged and soothed and thrilled me for my whole life, especially since I got a new lease on the latter. I care about jokes. I have about four trillion smart-assed opinions about comedy and comedians and stuff I hate that the Internet needs to know about, but I wanted to begin with this. What do you think?