The Oral Side of Humor*

In a footnote which seems to be almost in the nature of an afterthought in Jokes and the Unconscious,5 Freud touches upon the highly specific physiological nature of laughter. “So far as I know,” he writes, “the grimace characteristic of smiling … appears first in an infant at the breast when it is satisfied and satiated and lets go of the breast as it falls asleep…. This original meaning of pleasurable satiety,” he continues, “may have brought the smile, which is after all the basic phenomenon of laughter, into its later relation with the pleasurable processes of discharge.” According to later investigators, Freud was somewhat in error in supposing the feeding part of the infant nursing situation to be per se the earliest provoking stimulus of the smiling response. But he was certainly justified in drawing attention to the possible connection between this very early reaction to the numerous situations of expectancy and need gratification connected with the mother and nursing and a response which, as we experience it in later life, is (at least in one of its forms—let us say the “hearty” laugh) one of the only two—the other being complete orgastic discharge—bringing us the kind of tension release that intro-spectively we can link to the pleasurable feelings we presume the satiated nursling experiences. In so far as there is a connection, moreover, between nursing and smiling at all—and I will leave to