The Relation of Humor to Masochism

Humor in this study is treated in the strict sense of the term employed by Freud in his book “Wit and Its Relation to the Unconscious,” (1) and his essay “Humor.” (2) It is defined as the highest form of the comic. Freud distinguishes it from wit, which depends upon verbal expression and consists of a sudden release of inhibited unconscious content, and from caricature, parody, travesty and satire, which arouse laughter by in some way unmasking or degrading their object, or by bringing out a disproportion which pleases us by taking us back to infantile pleasure.

Humor is an attitude to an event, to a situation, or to life that makes what otherwise would appear sad and terrible seem insignificant and amusing. Humor may be expressed in jests but is not itself the jest, it is the attitude. Humor does not give the instantaneous intense pleasure, nor evoke the sudden hearty laughter that results from wit. It rather tends constantly to turn aside suffering, to create happiness, and it is rewarded by a chuckle more often than by an explosion of mirth.

From the standpoint of psychic economy Freud says that wit is an economy of the expenditure of inhibition, the comic an economy of thought, and humor an economy of affect. (1) Humor is a defense mechanism (2) which, unlike most other psychic defenses, never excludes the unpleasant content from consciousness, but displaces the energy of sadistic and masochistic drives upon the superego, and allows the ego to return to an innocent and safe childhood where no harm can touch it.

Freud (2) believed that it is the triumph of narcissism in this assertion of the invulnerability of the ego, and the cathexis on the superego that gives to humor its lofty character and its approach to the sublime. Since it is postambivalent it is benevolent, as other forms of the comic are not.

Kris (3) believes, however, that the real reason for the special position of humor in the various forms of laugh-producing mechanisms is that the humorist is self-suf