Jokes 3

Last week we were discussing the psychology of jokes. We concluded that a good joke makes, as it were, a total impression of enjoyment on us, without our being able to decide at once what share of the pleasure arises from its joking form and what share from its apt content matter. We are constantly making mistakes in this apportionment. Sometimes, we over-estimate the value of the joke on account of our admiration of the thought it contains, another time, on the contrary, we over-estimate the value of the thought on account of the enjoyment given to us by the form in which it is presented. We do not know what is giving us enjoyment and what we are laughing at. The thought seeks to wrap itself in a joke because in that way it recommends itself to our attention and can seem more significant and more valuable, but above all because this wrapping bribes our powers of criticism and confuses them. We are inclined to give the thought the benefit of what has pleased us in the form of the joke. Thus a joke can promote a thought by augmenting it and guarding it against criticism. They have succeeded in being expressed and giving pleasure. Thus a joke is a very powerful way of communication and its weight can be decisive. It can overcome the inhibitions of shame and respectability, it can upset the critical judgment and shatter the respect for institutions and truths. It is however, evident that not everyone is equally capable of making use of that method, the joke-work is not at everyone’s command, and altogether only a few people have a plentiful amount of it; and these are distinguished by being spoken of as having “wit”. The great majority of jokes, and especially those that are constantly being newly produced in connection with the events of the day, are circulated anonymously; one would be curious to learn from what sort of people such productions originate. The motive force for the production of jokes is often an ambitious urge to show one’s cleverness. A joke requires that it be told to someone. Therefore a joke fulfills the purpose of communication – if I come across something comic, I myself can laugh heartily at it, though it is true that I am also pleased if I can make someone else laugh by telling it to him. At the same time, it is evident that the hearer’s pleasure is more intense than the maker of the joke. We see, the hearer gives evidence of his pleasure with a burst of laughter, after the sayer of the joke has produced the joke with a tensely serious look. If one has to repeat a joke that one has heard themselves, one must not spoil its effect, behave in telling it exactly like the person who made it. Therefore jokes have to make use of the following methods. Firstly, try to keep the expression as short as possible, so as to offer fewer points of attack to the attention. Secondly, it should be easy to understand; as soon as there is a call for intellectual work which would demand a choice between different paths of thought, they would endanger their effect not only by the unavoidable expenditure of thought but also by the awakening of attention. Besides, the employment is of the device of distracting attention by putting forward something in the joke’s form of expression which catches it. Laughter is among the highly infectious expressions of life. When we make the other person laugh by telling him our joke, we are actually making use of him to arouse our own laughter, and one can observe that a person who has begun by telling a joke with a serious face afterwards joins in the other person’s laughter with a moderate laugh. The joke has succeeded in two objectives – firstly that the thought has been expressed and secondly that our own pleasure has been completed by a reaction from the other person. In repeating a joke invented by another person, we are making up for the loss of pleasure owing to one’s lack of novelty. There is no action that is more commonplace or that has been widely studied than laughter. There is none that has succeeded more in exciting the curiosity of ordinary people and that of philosophers. At the same time there is none that remains more unexplained. We must be content to laugh and not try to know why we laugh, since it may be that reflection kill laughter and it would thus be a contradiction to think that it could discover its causes.