Psychoanalyzing Jokes
Jokes are a part of culture that tries to bring about laughter in words that appears to be humorous. As the saying goes “jokes are half meant “, there are implications of jokes to the human person.
Simply put, jokes that are often said in a casual conversation are means for a repressed expression or feeling of a person to come out in the open. Kind of like a “slip of the tongue” situation. To establish the link of jokes in relation to the subconscious, let us take a look at this hypothetical example.A guy who jokes his friends about how his friends are being too childlike because of their parents’ 24/7 cared which according to Sigmund Freud’s Psychoanalytic theory could mean that he has a pathological need for the care of his own parents or at least someone to take care of him. The key concept in this example is that the ability of the guy to ask for love from his parents is repressed because probably he cannot say it blatantly then that desire for that care was voiced out through other means such as a joke. Driving the point of the connection between the jokes and the subconscious level, let us take a look at jokes in a community.Basing from the degree of the laughter that it had brought assuming that the delivery was good and other factors was alright, if we take a look at it, we see that some jokes are funny to others and to others not funny.
It could be said that the jokes are funny because they are true to life (in most cases) leading to the point that some people laugh at jokes and others don’t is because the joke is funny up to how other people could relate to the joke. So we could actually say that the culture of joke is rooted on the similarities of the people when it comes to experiences and if not experiences then feelings or sentiments.Freud argued that jokes is in relation with dreams is that jokes are the manifestation of desires that are contained inside the persons behavior. So jokes in the individual entities aspect is rooted on the history of the person mainly on his or her childhood. What is good about jokes is that not only that it gives off humor at the right place and time but also jokes in society acts as an outlet of desires or needs that people cannot actually ask for it directly maybe because of the fear of being subjected or compared to the rigid structure of what most people call as the social norm.Since jokes serves as an outlet to personal needs and desires that is concealed it actually helps the person from being sane and not accumulating these desires and let them burst in one blow and easily releases the tension from the persons consciousness. So addressing the question of psychoanalysis.
“What are the underlying cause of culture that is rooted in the biological entity or instinct? ” The culture of jokes may it be knock – knock to lawyer jokes and to any other types of jokes it is rooted on the need to bring about a feeling or desire that people cannot blatantly say or ask for.
