Ground rules: Choose one of the funniest jokes you’ve heard and which you can bear to think about repeatedly during the coming week.

1. Tell the joke (a) in its full and complete form, and then (b) in a compressed, telegraphed form that still retains the structure and punch-line and thus is still funny.

2. Analyze the joke from the point of view of its language. Why is it funny? How is it funny? (Are these really the same questions?) How does the machinery of the language make the punch-line work? Trace how the joke.builds through, turns toward and away from common assumptions, expectations, knowledge. How does your telegraphed version map this process out? What does it lose?

3. Analyze the joke from the point of view of its historical and social contexts. What jokes would you have to know in order to think this one funny? What mode, or form, or type of joke does this one reflect? Would you need to have also heard certain kinds of narration that were not jokes? What about the implicit meanings of its elements, agents, situations (i.e., stereotypes of role, age, sex, race, occupation, place, etc.)?

4. Capping the climax: “So what did the other guy say?” Write a continuation of the joke, pushing past the punch-line so that it becomes merely another of the joke’s structural elements; move on to a further joke, a brief essay, a meditation, or whatever you can make follow coherently upon the old punch-line.

5. Do either (a) or (b)

(a) Write a passage of description or narration which closes with a trap–a closing here which is analogous to the punch-line in your original joke, a closing which shifts the context and elicits a sudden change in the reader’s understanding of what is going on. (A crude example: A narration of some kind which ends with, “And then I woke up and found it was all a dream.”)

(b) Take an aphorism, preferably from La Rochefoucauld, Lichtenberg, Blake, Wilde, or Shaw (examples in the handout). Analyze its structure, what it includes and what it leaves out, its point, and the main experiences of the reader which it is playing with.

Examples

1) Answer not a fool according to his folly, lest thou be like unto him.
Answer do a fool according to his folly, lest he be wise in his own conceit.

2) When a poor man gets to eat a chicken, one of them is sick.
3) A donkey is a horse translated into Dutch.

(G.C. Lichtenberg)

4) Naked I came, naked I leave the scene,
And naked was my pastime in between.

(J.V. Cunningham)

5) What is it men in women do require?
The lineaments of gratified desire.
What is it women do in men require?
The lineaments of gratified desire.

(W. Blake)

6) Her whole life is an epigram, smack, smooth and neatly penned,
Plaited quite neat to catch applause with a sliding noose at the end.

(W. Blake)

Freud: Wit and its Relation to the Unconscious

We are now prepared for the rôle that wit plays in hostile aggression. Wit permits us to make our enemy ridiculous through that which we could not utter loudly or consciously on account of existing hindrances; in other words, wit affords us the means of surmounting restrictions and of opening up otherwise inaccessible pleasure sources. Moreover, the listener will be induced by the gain in pleasure to take our part, even if he is not altogether convinced,—just as we on other occasions, when fascinated by harmless witticism, were wont to overestimate the substance of the sentence wittily expressed. “To prejudice the laughter in one’s own favor” is a completely pertinent saying in the German language.
One may recall the Cincinatuss witticism given in the last chapter. It is of an insulting nature, as if the author wished to shout loudly: But the minister of agriculture is himself an ox! But he, as a man of culture, could not put his opinion in this form. He therefore appealed to wit which assured his opinion a reception at the hands of the listeners which, in spite of its amount of truth, never would have been received if in an unwitty form. Brill cites an excellent example of a similar kind: Wendell Phillips, according to a recent biography by Dr. Lorenzo Sears, was on one occasion lecturing in Ohio, and while on a railroad journey going to keep one of his appointments met in the car a number of clergymen returning from some sort of convention. One of the ministers, feeling called upon to approach Mr. Phillips, asked him, “Are you Mr. Phillips?” “I am, sir.” “Are you trying to free the niggers?” “Yes, sir; I am an abolitionist.” “Well, why do you preach your doctrines up here? Why don’t you go over into Kentucky?” “Excuse me, are you a preacher?” “I am, sir.” “Are you trying to save souls from hell?” “Yes, sir, that’s my business.” “Well, why don’t you go there?” The assailant hurried into the smoker amid a roar of unsanctified laughter. This anecdote nicely illustrates the tendency-wit in the service of hostile aggression. The minister’s behavior was offensive and irritating, yet Wendell Phillips as a man of culture could not defend himself in the same manner as a common, ill-bred person would have done, and as his inner feelings must have prompted him to do. The only alternative under the circumstances would have been to take the affront in silence, had not wit showed him the way, and enabled him by the technical means of unification to turn the tables on his assailant. He not only belittled him and turned him into ridicule, but by his clever retort, “Well, why don’t you go there?” fascinated the other clergymen, and thus brought them to his side.
Although the hindrance to the aggression which the wit helped to elude was in these cases of an inner nature—the æsthetic resistance against insulting—it may at other times be of a purely outer nature. So it was in the case when Serenissimus asked the stranger who had a striking resemblance to himself: “Was your mother ever in my home?” and he received the ready reply, “No, but my father was.” The stranger would certainly have felled the imprudent inquirer who dared to make an ignominious allusion to the memory of his mother; but this imprudent person was Serenissimus, who may not be felled and not even insulted unless one wishes to pay for this revenge with his life. The only thing left was to swallow the insult in silence; but luckily wit pointed out the way of requiting the insult without personally imperiling one’s self. It was accomplished simply by treating the allusion with the technical means of unification and employing it against the aggressor. The impression of wit is here so thoroughly determined by the tendency that in view of the witty rejoinder we are inclined to forget that the aggressor’s inquiry is itself made witty by allusion.