Kidding—A Form of Humour

Freud considers that the super-ego inherits the position of the parent and actually treats the ego as the parents treated the child in his early years. He has suggested that in humour, the super-ego reacts to the ego as if the latter were a child which it seeks to comfort.1

Here, as in many other of Freud's discoveries, one finds corroboration in popular psychology and phraseology. The term 'kidding' in American slang means to treat like a child ('kid' being an almost universal vernacular for little child). However, kidding is not without an element of mild cruelty in which the kidder, from a position of advantage or superior knowledge, vents a little momentary pressure against the persons whom he kids and in this characteristic approximates the position of the mastery of the super-ego. Inveterate kidders seem to be projecting an intolerance of their super-egos to their own childishness upon objects less capable of defending themselves. Such 'kidders' usually take kidding badly, and in the analysis of unusually violent outbursts of resentment of patients to kidding by others it developed that unconsciously they often invited and relished the kidding as an agreeable attestation and as justifiable, but consciously were called upon to defend their super-egos.

The following Americanisms serve to illustrate and support Freud's theory: When a person attempts to jest, to 'put something over' on another, a common slang retort is 'quit your kidding.' In other words, cease treating me as if I were as guileless and defenceless as a child.

A patient, with an intractable fear of his father, remarked 'I like to say to those who try to kid me—"don't kid me, Big Boy, I'm way ahead of you"'—which translated means, 'don't attempt to treat me as a child, you, who consider yourself superior to me ('Big Boy' is sarcasm), I am really your master' (though the patient felt he was not). This idea is carried still further in such a phrase as 'kid me, kid, I am simple'—meaning, don't you