Many female comics are undermining misogynistic discourse simply by echoing its lines, using humour to reveal the unfunny side of sexist jokes.

About Devorah Baum

"I'm an Associate Professor in English Literature and Critical Theory at the University of Southampton.

I research literature, philosophy, psychoanalysis and religion, and I've laid a particular emphasis in recent years on feelings and their role in our lives, and on jokes. And I'm currently writing a book on marriage."

Expressing our smuttier thoughts

One of the liberating thrills of stand-up is watching someone uninhibited by social mores, because comics love nothing better than speaking about rude or censored things like shit, sex and obscenity. For Freud, the reason we joke is partly because we need somewhere to express our smuttier thoughts. We crave places where the lewd ideas we’re walking around with, consciously or not, can come out. This need, Freud believed, was as vital to us as the need for sexual discharge itself, which is an extraordinary, remarkable idea when you think about it.

In his book on jokes, Freud divides jokes into two main varieties, the innocent and the tendentious. Tendentious jokes always have a victim, and sexual jokes are of this variety. Freud defined smut as the intentional bringing into prominence of sexual acts and relations made by speech. What motivates the comedian is the desire to see what is sexual as not hidden, but exposed. For that to happen, three people are required: the teller of the joke, the object of the joke’s sexual aggressiveness and the hearer of the joke, in whom the joke’s aim of producing pleasure is fulfilled.

Key Points

• According to Freud, we joke because we need to express our smuttier thoughts. Jokes are either innocent or tendentious; the latter always have a victim.
• Freud says that a man who laughs at smut is laughing as though he’s the spectator of an act of sexual aggression. Similarly, a politician who denounces political correctness and makes lewd jokes, for example, appears to offer supporters a kind of libidinal
• Many female comics are undermining misogynistic discourse simply by echoing its lines, using humour to reveal the unfunny side of sexist jokes.