Page:Freud - Wit and its relation to the unconscious.djvu/112

 to a trivial occurrence. In the place of the entire audience there appears one woman and the riding figure becomes individually determined. It is necessarily the Duke of Wellington, who is so very popular in Ireland. But the insolence of the museum proprietor or lecturer who takes money from the public and offers nothing in return is represented by the opposite, through a speech, in which he extols himself as a conscientious business man whose fondest desire is to respect the rights to which the public is entitled through the admission fee. One then realizes that the technique of this joke is not very simple. In so far as a way is found to allow the swindler to assert his scrupulosity it may be said that the joke is a case of “representation through the opposite.” The fact, however, that he does it on an occasion where something different is demanded of him, and the fact that he replies in terms of commercial integrity when he is expected to discuss the similarity of the figures, shows that it is a case of displacement. The technique of the joke lies in the combination of both technical means.

Outdoing-wit

This example is closely allied to another small group which might be called “outdoing-wit.”