Page:Freud - Wit and its relation to the unconscious.djvu/357

 of comparison thus becomes reduced to a case of degradation.

The comparison, as we have seen above, can now be witty without a trace of comic admixture, especially when it happens to evade the degradation. Thus the comparison of Truth to a torch which one cannot carry through a crowd without singeing somebody’s beard is pure wit, because it takes an obsolete expression (“The torch of truth”) at its full value and not at all in a comical sense, and because the torch as an object does not lack a certain distinction, though it is a concrete object. However, a comparison may just as well be witty as comic, and what is more one may be independent of the other, in that the comparison becomes an aid for certain techniques of wit, as, for example, unification or allusion. Thus Nestroy’s comparison of memory to a “Warehouse” (p. 120) is simultaneously comical and witty, first, on account of the extraordinary degradation to which the psychological conception must consent in the comparison to a “Warehouse,” and secondly, because he who utilizes the comparison is a clerk, and in this comparison he establishes a rather unexpected unification between psychology and his vocation. Heine’s verse, “until at last the buttons tore from the pants of my patience,” seems