Sophistic Humor and Social Change: Overcoming Identification with the Aggressor

Psychological barriers to social change represent rhetorical challenges. The critic hoping to contribute to social change must uncover discursive strategies for overcoming psychological barriers. Ideally, those strategies must be teachable to students or clients for academic critics to make positive contributions to the public sphere. On another level, if we agree with Maurice Charland that “rhetoric's high card in postmodern social theory” is that it “conceives of the audience as a ‘capacity to respond’ that forms the horizon for a determination of the good and for proper praxis,” then we must ask whether that high card may be played when an audience has a severely diminished “capacity to respond” (“Finding” 73).

As a response to those challenges, this essay will explore the implications for rhetoric of the psychoanalytic idea of “sophistic joking.” Using the examples of comedians Mort Sahl and Dick Gregory, it will show how sophistic joking can overcome identification with the aggressor, a powerful barrier to social change. After exploring this barrier, it will explain Freud's notion of sophistic joking and explore Sahl's and Gregory's uses of this discursive form to overcome identification with the aggressor. Finally, it will consider some of the limitations of sophistic joking.

Identification with the aggressor was first described in a psychoanalytic context by Sigmund Freud. In The Interpretation of Dreams, Freud described a dream in which he placed himself in the position of one who had the power to deny him a professorship. Also in the dream, he used his position to denounce his uncle and his friend. Rather than wait passively for the appointment, in the dream Freud took over an active role, and some of the cruelty of the persons currently in those positions, as well. Further, in Beyond the Pleasure Principle, Freud noted that often when a child has suffered some invasive procedure at the hands of t