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"Humor is wit and love."—Thackeray
The first psychoanalytic study of humor we owe to Freud. In his early writings on wit, Freud stated that humor affords pleasure because it spares an expenditure of emotion. Many years later in a brief article, Freud supplemented this economic point of view with a dynamic one, pointing out the special behavior of the humorist's super-ego in the humorous attitude. The displacement of affective charges which occurs within the mental apparatus during this process suggested to Freud that he might find an explanatory analogy in the alternation of depressive and manic states. Despite the fundamental importance of such analogical observations for the psychology of normal mental life, with the exception of Reik and Hitschmann other psychoanalytic investigators have paid no further attention to humor, and even those two authors have dealt with this topic in a somewhat offhand way in relation to the subject of wit. The opinion seems to prevail that Freud has said essentially all there is to be said about humor. Yet, an attentive student of Freud's works, who has been observant on his own account as well, will recognize that Freud's carefully formulated statements are merely a valuable foundation for further investigation.
According to Freud, the ability to be a humorist resides in the fact that the humorist can hypercathect his super-ego and thereby alter the reactions of his ego. The pleasure of humor afforded the ego by the super-ego originates thus from a saving in the expenditure of the ego's available affect. The unpleasurable emotions set aside in favor of humor may be of various