“The Jews”
On the Nose
00:00
The Relief of Tension in a Joke
I was thinking about what you just said. I also think like comedy, like relating to what Rebecca just said about the relief of tension is something that I feel like people really miss about what comedy does. Freud wrote this like impenetrable book about jokes, which like it's hard to recommend because it's so annoying. But he's right about the fact that the structure of a joke is about pointing to contradiction, pointing to real wounds on all sides. And often there are people in a room who might have tension with each other, which the joke points to and the function of the joke is to find a way to sublimate ambivalence into laughter.
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