Reddit reviews Jokes and Their Relation to the Unconscious (The Standard Edition) (Complete Psychological Works of Sigmund Freud)

One thing I have learned is you can't trust Trump to only be "joking"

https://www.washingtonpost.com/news/global-opinions/wp/2018/03/07/president-trumps-jokes-are-no-laughing-matter/?utm_term=.a8d13d9eac34

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> The president’s comments are no laughing matter even if they were intended humorously, which is far from clear. In 1905, Sigmund Freud published a book called “Jokes and Their Relation to the Unconsciousness” making the point that jokes are often a way to vent distasteful desires, either lustful or aggressive, in a socially approved fashion. Humor scholars (yes, they exist) have dubbed this ”relief theory.” While it doesn’t cover every type of joke (e.g., puns), Freud’s insight applies to a lot of what passes for levity.

I have long found this to be an interesting topic as it relates to how laughter/humor might be a reflection of one's morals. Freud's Jokes and Their Relation to the Unconscious comes to mind.

Here's a pretty comprehensive summary of different philosophies of humor/laughter from the Stanford Encyclopedia of Philosophy.

A good piece from the SEP article:

>Plato, the most influential critic of laughter, treated it as an emotion that overrides rational self-control. In the Republic (388e), he says that the Guardians of the state should avoid laughter, “for ordinarily when one abandons himself to violent laughter, his condition provokes a violent reaction.” Especially disturbing to Plato were the passages in the Iliad and the Odyssey where Mount Olympus was said to ring with the laughter of the gods. He protested that “if anyone represents men of worth as overpowered by laughter we must not accept it, much less if gods.”
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>Another of Plato's objections to laughter is that it is malicious. In Philebus (48–50), he analyzes the enjoyment of comedy as a form of scorn. “Taken generally,” he says, “the ridiculous is a certain kind of evil, specifically a vice.” That vice is self-ignorance: the people we laugh at imagine themselves to be wealthier, better looking, or more virtuous than they really are. In laughing at them, we take delight in something evil—their self-ignorance—and that malice is morally objectionable.

Right after this section the article goes into the Biblical and Christian views of laughter (mostly negative for the first part of Christian history).

http://www.amazon.com/Relation-Unconscious-Standard-Complete-Psychological/dp/0393001458

There is this: http://www.amazon.com/Relation-Unconscious-Standard-Complete-Psychological/dp/0393001458