Page:Freud - Wit and its relation to the unconscious.djvu/71



Puns are especially fond of modifying one of the vowels of the word; e.g., Hevesi (Almanaccando, Reisen in Italien, p. 87) says of an Italian poet who was hostile to the German emperor, but who was, nevertheless, forced to sing his praises in his hexameters, “Since he could not exterminate the Cæsars he at least annihilated the cæsuras.”

From the multitude of puns which are at our disposal it may be of special interest to us to quote a really poor example for which Heine (Book Le Grand, Chapter V) is responsible. After parading for a long time before his lady as an “Indian Prince” the suitor suddenly lays aside his mask and confesses, “Madam, I have lied to you. I have never been in Calcutta any more than that Calcutta roast which I relished yesterday for lunch.” Obviously the fault of this witticism lies in the fact that both words are not merely similar, but identical. The bird which served as a roast for his lunch is called so because it comes from, or at least is supposed to come from, the same city of Calcutta.

K. Fischer has given much attention to this form of wit and insists upon making a sharp distinction between it and the “play on words” (p. 78). “A pun,” he says, “is a bad play on words, for it does not play with the word as a