The author attempts to clarify the place of humor in psychoanalytic theory. Freud's 1927 paper, Humour, stands midway in time between The Future of an Illusion and Civilization and Its Discontents. It offered a hopeful contrast to these two pessimistic works, for it conceived of a possible collaboration between the various psychic structures to the profit of the libido. As Strachey commented, the superego was presented 'in an amiable mood'. In humor, we are not so much involved with sublimation as with a modification of the instinctual aim, with the satisfaction of the impulse in attenuated form. Freud's insistence on the elevated