Jokes and the Logic of the Cognitive Unconscious

February 18, 2021 Jeremiah Hendren

Jokes and the Logic of the Cognitive Unconscious

Minsky*, Marvin
Cognitive Constraints on Communication, pp. 175-200. Springer, Dordrecht, 1980
https://doi.org/10.1007/978-94-010-9188-6_10

* Professor at MIT, winner of Turing Award (among others)

In trying to classify humorous phenomena, Sigmund Freud asks whether this should be called a joke, “for the fact is we do not yet know in what the characteristic of being a joke resides.” Let us agree that some of the cake-joke’s humor is related to a logical absurdity—leaving aside whether it is in the logic itself, or in keeping track of it. Later Freud goes on to ask what is the status of a “knife without a blade which has no handle?” This absurdity has a different quality; some representation is being misused—like a frame without a picture. Freud, who never returned to the subject after writing his 1905 book on the theory of jokes, suggested that “censors” in the mind form powerful, unconscious barriers that make it difficult to think “forbidden” thoughts. But jokes can elude these censors—to create the pleasure of unearned release of psychic energy, which is discharged in the form of laughter. He explains why jokes tend to be compact and condensed, with double meanings: this is to fool the childishly simple-minded censors, who see only innocent surface meanings and fail to penetrate the disguise of the forbidden wishes.

Marvin Minsky

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