The Economy of Comedy

Like most psychic phenomena, comedy, for Freud, involved the discovery of normally inaccessible reaches of mental activity—activity which the joker attempts to conceal from himself—so that in part he is always his own victim as well as his own beneficiary. Energy expended in the inhibition of a repressed and so unconscious drive, in a preconscious comparison between ideas, or in the generation of distressing affects is liberated and discharged in laughter. Freud termed such transactions economies and identified jokes, the comic, and humor as distinct categories of comedy according to the mechanism of pleasure each employed. Freud concluded,

The pleasure in jokes has seemed to us to arise from an economy in expenditure upon inhibition, the pleasure in the comic from an economy in expenditure upon ideation (upon cathexis) and the pleasure in humor from an economy in expenditure upon feeling.9a

Located within the wider context of his theory of instincts, a theory Freud saw resting uncertainly “on the frontier between the mental and the somatic,” this formulation of economy does not so much address itself to the fundamental responsibilities of comedy as restate an implicit judgment about the nature of pleasure. For Freud pleasure was a function of the ultimately static aim of instinctual energy and consequently of the principles governing its economy. Subject to unconscious processes, it was directed toward a biologically determined end over which the individual had little or no control and accordingly was measurable solely in terms of amounts of excitation. The economies by which pleasure could be obtained, however, initially suggest the question of whether the