Page:Freud - Wit and its relation to the unconscious.djvu/53

 sense was expressed with the same words, the better is the technical means of wit. And how simple are the means of its production! “Put in a dinner and a speech appears—put in a speech and a dinner appears.” This is really nothing but an exchange of places of these two phrases whereby what was said of Y becomes differentiated from what is said of X. To be sure, this is not the whole technique of the joke.

Great latitude is afforded the technique of wit if one so extends the “manifold application of the same material” that the word—or the words—upon which the wit depends may be used first unchanged and then with a slight modification. An example is another joke of Mr. N. He heard a gentleman, who himself was born a Jew, utter a malicious statement about Jewish character. “Mr. Councilor,” said he, “I am familiar with your antesemitism, but your antisemitism is new to me.”

Here only one single letter is changed, the modification of which could hardly be noticed in careless pronunciation. This example reminds one of the other modification jokes of Mr.