From the third person intruder to the public sphere
Sunday 21 of August
Jokes, for Freud, are “made”, as opposed to the comical situation, which must simply be traced down and recognized. Those who say something witty do something new. The retort alters the situation into which it enters, thanks to certain semantic and rethorical prerogatives in its possession. I do not intend to discuss Freud’s theses on jokes, nor, far less, to criticize them. It is enough for me to show that a radically different explanation of these same phenomena is also legitimate. And that this alternative explanation takes root precisely in certain Freudian observations.
Jokes, for Freud, are “made”, as opposed to the comical situation, which must simply be traced down and recognized. Whoever coins a joke does something new: “Have you taken a bath?” someone asks severely of a very dirty friend. “What, is there one missing?” the friend replies, unperturbed. Moreover, while the comical dimension can be completely, or only in part, nonlinguistic, the joke is exclusively verbal. Those who say something witty do something new; let us note carefully, something they could not have done without words. The retort alters the situation into which it enters, thanks to certain semantic and rethorical prerogatives in its possession, as outlined by Freud right at the beginning of Witz: “the coupling of dissimilar things, contrasting ideas, ‘sense in nonsense’, the succession of bewilderment and enlightenment, the bringing forward of waht is hidden, and the peculiar brevity of it”.
Doing something new with words: this general characteristic does not allow us, however, to grasp fully the nature of jokes. In and of itself, it does not clarify the situation sufficiently: even those who elaborate upon an ingenious metaphor create something new with words. On the other hand, the Freudian identikit of verbal creativity at work within the joke suggests, preliminarily, an affinity between “joke-work” and “dream-work”: even the dreamer, in fact, proceeds by way of “the approach of dissimilar elements, the contrast of representation, the sense of the absurd.” The distance that separates jokes from other forms of linguistic invention, but also and above all from the realms of dreams, is attested to even by Freud himself, when he emphasizes -on a number of occasions and in the most diverse contexts, as happens with every self-respecting refrain- the nullifying role played, only in the act of joke making, by the so-called “third person”. What does that mean?
Paolo Virno is an Italian Philosopher, professor at the University of Calabria. Some of his writings have been translated into English: A grammar of the multitude: for an analysis of contemporary forms of life, Multitude. Between innovation and negation. Other smaller texts have been compiled in Radical Thought in Italy. A potential politics.
