Page:Freud - Wit and its relation to the unconscious.djvu/228

 such a conception does not contradict the nature of pleasure, and proves itself productive also in other fields. The nonsense-witticisms, which have been somewhat slighted in this treatise, deserve a short supplementary comment.

In view of the significance attributed by our conception to the factor “sense in nonsense,” one might be tempted to demand that every witticism should be a nonsense-joke. But this is not necessary, because only the play with thoughts inevitably leads to nonsense, whereas the other source of wit-pleasure, the play with words, makes this impression incidental and does not regularly invoke the criticism connected with it. The double root of wit-pleasure—from the play with words and thoughts, which corresponds to the most important division into word- and thought-witticisms—sets its face against a short formulation of general principles about wit as a tangible aggravation of difficulties. The play with words produces laughter, as is well known, in consequence of the factor of recognition described above, and therefore suffers suppression only in a small degree. The play with thoughts cannot be motivated through such pleasure: it has suffered a very energetic suppression and the pleasure which it can give is only the pleasure of released inhibitions. Accordingly one may say that wit-pleasure shows a kernel of the original play-pleasure and a shell of removal-pleasure. Naturally we do not grant that the pleasure in nonsense-wit is due to the fact that we have succeeded in making nonsense despite the suppression, while we do notice that the play with words gives us pleasure. Nonsense, which has remained fixed in thought wit, acquires secondarily the function of stimulating our attention through confusion, it serves as a reinforcement of the effect of wit, but only when it is insistent, so that the confusion can anticipate the intellect by a definite fraction of time. That nonsense in wit may also be employed to represent a judgment contained within the thought has been demonstrated by the example on p. 73. But even this is not the primal signification of nonsense in wit.

A series of wit-like productions for which we have no appropriate name, but which may lay claim to the designation of “witty nonsense,”