While reading Freud’s piece on the lunacy of comedy and the meaning of the term joke, I couldn’t help but think about the hilarious exchange between Lee, Carter and Master Yu. Detective Carter rushes in and starts questioning the Master Yu asking “Who are you?”, to which he replies “I am Yu”. This confuses the audience and Carter and Lee because he is obviously not Carter, this continues when it keeps going “Are you deaf?”, followed by “No Yu is blind” eventually they turn to another person in attendance asking who they are to which he replies “I’m Mi” and then Master Yu finally clears any confusion by stating that “He’s Mi and I’m Yu” finally clarifying that Mi and Yu are their names.
This exchange lends itself to the philosophy of the joke, the structure Freud lays out, “Other more or less interrelated ideas which have been brought up as defining or describing jokes are: a contrast of ideas’, sense in nonsense’, bewilderment and illumination”. In this scene we see all of these play out in this exact order, firstly the contrasting of ideas, the multipurpose of Yu and you, one being a name while the other being a pronoun, this sets into motion the entire misunderstanding where Carter mistakes the former with the latter.and then it goes on a chain of nonsense while the audience are at first clueless as to what is going on because of the multicultural gap (Yu obviously isn’t a traditionally western name).
The bewilderment according to Freud is this double meaning and the confusion brought by it, “Here the word that is the vehicle of the joke appears at first simply to be a wrongly constructed word, something unintelligible, incomprehensible, and puzzling.” If the linguistics made sense or the characters explained the confusion, the exchange wouldn’t be funny, the humor is derived by the clueless misunderstanding not only with the characters but from the perspective of the spectator, as we all know explaining a joke and giving it meaning, rids it of the comedic essence and turns the conversation into a basic exchange with nothing to laugh at. Only once the joke has run can the subjects “illuminate” the audience understanding, explaining the mistake but not so soon that it spoils the audience enjoyment.
Within the social confines of the situation is the importance of the joke never being taken a step too far, it isn’t insulting nor offensive, it is merely a play on words. But as Mary Douglas outlines, Sigmund Freud and Henri Bergson have a different philosophy of what constitutes as a joke, Bergson finding humor in a subjects loss of control in a comedic setting, whereas while Freud somewhat shares in this approach, he “uses more abstractly and flexibly” the joke. The joke is a loss of control in the formal via an attack from the informal is what Douglas explains in short, and this is no more present than in what should’ve been a normal meeting between detectives and potential leads, turned into a silly wrongful comprehension of nouns and pronouns, the normal is invaded by the ridiculous, not explained until the joke has taken its course.