What Freud Knew About Why We Laugh

"Why don't scientists trust atoms?" "Because they make up everything."

That joke isn't especially funny. But have you ever wondered why a joke is funny in the first place? In The Joke and Its Relation to the Unconscious, Freud set out a whole series of psychoanalytic theories about jokes. Let's spend three minutes together looking at how psychoanalysts read a joke — and how the theory of the unconscious can be applied to humour.

Psychoanalysis and the defence mechanisms

Before we go further into the relationship between jokes and psychoanalysis, we need to get acquainted with two psychoanalytic concepts: psychodynamics and defence mechanisms. Psychodynamics is one of the theoretical frameworks Freud used to make sense of mental activity; its guiding ideas borrow from thermodynamics, attempting to explain mental activity in terms of the flow of energy. Defence mechanisms, meanwhile, are a set of techniques for transforming the urges within the unconscious id that society will not accept. The two defence mechanisms most relevant to jokes are the most basic — suppression — and the highest — sublimation. When a person's unconscious produces an unacceptable urge, such as hatred or sexual desire, the simplest approach is to suppress the urge into the unconscious; the most ideal way of handling it is to sublimate the urge, expressing it constructively through art or other creative forms.

The heart of a joke

According to psychoanalytic theory, the unconscious id is full of primal urges, including sexual desire, violence and aggression. From the standpoint of psychodynamics, when suppression is used to keep these urges from leaking into consciousness, psychic energy accumulates within the mental system, building up stress. Most of the funniest jokes draw on material to do with sex or with mockery — material connected to the urges in the unconscious id. So when we hear or tell a joke, we have an outlet through which the desires of the unconscious can be released, and that release lowers our psychic stress and gives us a feeling of pleasure. Freud called this process catharsis; he believed it could release strong, suppressed emotions, with effects that could even serve as a form of psychotherapy. From the psychoanalytic angle, then, we can get a rough sense of what drives a joke: it strikes a soft spot in our unconscious. That said, if we simply talked openly about sex or racial discrimination, the reaction we'd get would be the polar opposite of the one a joke earns. Beyond motive, we might also want to look at the psychological process a joke involves.

In the eyes of psychoanalysts, a joke is funny because it can express, with a light touch, urges that are not easily accepted in ordinary life. Off-colour jokes, jokes that mock — their appeal lies in the sexual desire and aggression they conceal towards others. Self-deprecation, too, can mask anxieties that the conscious mind finds hard to bear. In a joke, desire and anxiety can be sublimated out of the unconscious into constructive language. Whether you are the one creating the joke or the one listening to it, you can feel the desire or emotion hidden within it; after passing through sublimation, these ideas may no longer be taboo but instead are given a chance to be released. Sublimation is precisely the process by which an urge is transformed into a joke, allowing these desires to be let out.

How do you become a funny person?

In his book Freud discussed only the relationship between jokes and the unconscious; he did not go further to explain the steps to becoming funny. Beyond the influence of the unconscious, Freud and other scholars who have studied jokes all agree that a joke contains a degree of "incongruence". In most jokes, even a "lame gag", there will be incongruity between the surface meaning and a deeper meaning. Take a comic duo, or a celebrity caught in a scandal: what makes them funny isn't how attractive a particular performer is, but that we all understand what the in-group reference behind them is pointing to. In Freud's theory, this incongruity at the level of content can be extended further into a conflict between the conscious and the unconscious. Take that comic duo or that scandal again: they are funny not only because they conceal a clash between our emotions, the literal meaning and the hidden meaning — the context of the times is also undeniably a hugely important factor. The more you pull at it, the more the backdrop of humour turns out to be full of conditions we had never thought about. To become a funny person, you may have to put in some work: studying the desires and impulses in people's unconscious, keeping up with the development of popular culture, and seeking out the possibilities for incongruity to appear. Otherwise, what comes out of your mouth will only be an awkward, unfunny "dad joke".