Also you want to have sex with your mom.
There, I just saved you 230 pages (plus 42 pages of introductory material.)
Speaking of that introductory material, they did such a good job explaining the material that followed, I felt perfectly comfortable skimming most of it. Don't feel like I missed much.
However, these passages jumped out at me as I went and they're worth a share:
“We
stress that the activity of joking cannot be said to have no aim or purpose,
for it has set itself the unmistakable aim of arousing pleasure in the
listener.”
“The
most powerful stimulus to the joke-work is the presence of strong tendencies,
reaching into the unconscious, which represent a special aptitude for producing
jokes and may explain why the subjective conditions for making jokes are so
frequently fulfilled in neurotic persons.”
“There
are other ways of regaining nonsense and deriving pleasure from it; caricature,
exaggeration, parody, and travesty make use of it, and in this way create
‘comic nonsense.’”
I would be perfectly happy with someone dismissing my literary work as "comic nonsense." Though I prefer to think of it as mostly "extreme whimsy in a skewed reality."
Oh, one other big point worth knowing: jokes don't age well. It's hard to tell whether they're translation errors, or just that early 20th century humor is no match for 21st century sensibilities.
Example:
“A
wife is like an umbrella. After all, before long one takes a cab.”
Nah.
Be honest: do you even understand that joke? No Googling. Stone cold: do you get it?
Follow-up: if you do, is it funny? And why?
If you take Freud seriously, then consciously or unconsciously: The joke's on you.
-Phony McFakename
Re: the wife joke - I think it means "A wife, like an umbrella, is basically useless due to the existence of willing women (cabs)." Do I find that funny? Nope.
ReplyDelete(I did not Google prior to answering, but now I will.)
Correct, on all fronts! I didn’t get it without a Google. The wording threw me. Anyway, please tell your spouse I’m sorry for making fun of his fave author.
DeleteI think I understood this joke as Devo did and I didn't find it funny either. Other times are like foreign countries.
ReplyDeleteHow many Freudians does it take to change a lightbulb?
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V
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V
Sex, er, mother, no father, I mean six, it's 6.
Bwahaha!
Delete