Wit and Its Relation to the Unconscious Book

2.5 stars.
When the introducer in his introduction writes something like, "Besides, readers of his [Freud's] Joke book who have been uneasily conscious of the persistent failures of understanding prompted by such mismatches are entitled to know that their stupidity is not to blame (or at any rate is shared by a fellow-reader). In reality, as we have seen, a factor that obstructs any easy understanding of the text is that the terms evolved by Freud in his analysis of dreams cannot have the same meaning when applied to jokes. But he writes as if they can." the reader knows she may be in trouble, and if she choses to proceed, perhaps her stupidity will not, in this instance, be so pardonable.

If this book was a joke-and in a few but rather unfunny and yet major ways it is-its punchline would be (you might have guessed): 'your mother's vagina'; and if Freud could just be so concise, he'd have himself a joke that might elicit a laugh-that is the out-loud kind everyone is talking about these days-from which the reader could better follow his explication. As it is, the enterprise suffers from a few critical issues: the translation of jokes across languages, the translation of jokes across cultures, and the translation of jokes across time. Add to that what is Freud's (likely) pedestrian sense of humor and you have yourself a rather tedious read hidden behind the promise of an interesting, if not enlightening, philosophical investigation; it is at best a biographical and historical window into the author himself.

As I began to suggest, it is because few if any of the book's jokes are actually funny that book's treatise is, from the beginning, severed from the only interesting question: 'Why do we laugh?' or 'Just what sort of phenomena is laughter?' At one point-and one that I suspect Freud is not being so humble as he might sound-the author admits: "we do not in the strict sense know what we are laughing at." But he continually does a rather unsatisfactory job of expounding this. The reader might learn some psychological motivations that certain kinds of jokes perhaps condemn their tellers to, but will likely be disappointed if looking for a deeper understanding of how and why the human animal becomes victim to what Wikipedia describes as the involuntary, physical reaction, consisting typically of rhythmical, often audible contractions of the diaphragm and other parts of the respiratory system.

Freud intermittently suggests a sort of energetic economy as the basis of 'funniness' but as soon as this seems an interesting inroad, his own tendency to speak presumptively and authoritatively where he has earned little right to do so, gets in the way. He often speaks to the reader as if she is already on board, "we can only surmise that…", "we have now learned…" etc. And when he says things like: "I have not come up against anything that would have required me to alter or improve my line of thought, so I can wait quietly until my readers' understanding has caught up with me, or at least until intelligent criticism has proved to me the fundamental errors of my view." it seems that he cares less about being right than he does about being ahead.

Regrettable, and unless you're a Freud scholar/enthusiast, forgettable.