Beeman 1

Uncanny Laughter: Reworking Freud’s Theory of Jokes with E. T. A.

Hoffmann’s ‘The Sandman’

E. T. A. Hoffmann’s tale ‘The Sandman’ begins with an epistolary exchange between

its protagonist Nathanael and his childhood friends Lothar and Clara. Recent disturbing
events have recalled Nathanael’s boyhood terror of the legendary Sandman, yet even in his
horror, Nathanael anticipates a comic response from which he is estranged; he ‘hears’ his
friends laughing as he begins to write—and seeks to appropriate this imaginary laughter with
the following demand: ‘Laugh, I beg you, laugh at me heartily!—I beg it of you!’.1 Needless
to say, Nathanael’s demand for laughter has a sobering effect. Clara, who is the first reader
of Nathanael’s version of the tale, reports that she ‘could joke about the [. . .] Sandman’, if
her friend’s distress didn’t speak from every line of his letter. This does not keep her from
pledging to ‘appear’ in Nathanael’s dreams in order to drive away the Sandman ‘with loud
laughter’.2 The laugher Clara promises no longer expresses the pleasure of one who ‘could
have joked’; it has been guaranteed in advance and will be produced under compulsion.
We are surprised at this point by the intrusion of an anonymous narrator, who
interrupts the first-person exchange of letters between Hoffmann’s protagonists to reiterate
the fabricated nature of any laughter the tale might inspire. After professing that he begins
the narrative with an epistolary exchange only because he knows not how—nor where—to
begin the story himself, this new third-person narrator offers us a series of rejected
experimental beginnings, including one written ‘when I thought I perceived something
comical in the wild gaze of the student Nathanael’; but ‘the story’, he insists, ‘is not funny at
all’.3 Just as Nathanael’s demand for laughter has a sobering effect, the narrator’s prohibition
against it prepares the reader to dissolve helplessly in laughter. Yet the tale withholds any
such immediate consummation of our comic response. Instead, Hoffmann’s text constructs

1
E. T. A. Hoffmann, ‘Der Sandmann’, in Sämtliche Werke in sechs Bänden, Band 3: Nachtstücke; Klein
Zaches; Prinzessin Brambilla; Werke 1816-1820, ed. by Hartmut Steinecke and Gerhard Allroggen (Frankfurt
am Main: Deutscher Klassiker Verlag, 1985), pp. 11-49 (p. 12). Referenced hereafter as S. All translations are
mine unless otherwise noted. The German reads: ‘Lacht, ich bitte Euch, lacht mich recht herzlich aus! –ich bitt’
Euch sehr!’.
2
Hoffmann, S 23, my emphasis.
3
Ibid. 27, my emphasis. ‘Das hatte ich in der Tat schon aufgeschrieben, als ich in dem wilden Blick des
Studenten Nathanael etwas possierliches zu verspüren glaubte; die Geschichte ist aber gar nicht spaßhaft.’
 Beeman 2
laughter in a mediated and disguised form, allowing the reader to release laugher from it only
through a laborious process of reading that is not guaranteed to succeed. The laughter that is
released and the pleasure of laughing, moreover, do not belong to anyone—least of all to the
reader. It seems rather as though the text laughs upon being read. In the rapid movement
from Nathanael’s ‘I hear you laughing’ and ‘please laugh’, to Clara’s ‘I could joke’, to the
narrator’s flat denial that there is any laugh to be had, something comical has been buried in
Hoffmann’s tale. A joke is stifled or has failed.
* * *
Sigmund Freud analyzes Hoffmann’s tale in his famous essay ‘The Uncanny’, which
first appeared in 1919, a decade and a half after his 1905 book The Joke and Its Relation to
the Unconscious. Nonetheless, one might ask whether ‘The Sandman’ could have served as a
literary case study for Freud’s investigation of jokes and laughter as well as it serves his study
of uncanny experience. In light of the clumsy partial burial of comedy and laughter
performed in its opening pages, Hoffmann’s tale forces us to ask whether there may be a
relationship between Freud’s theory of the uncanny and his theory of jokes.
Although ‘The Uncanny’ did not surface until twelve years later, Freud may have
composed it as early as 1907, just two years after his book on jokes. Critics agree that
Freud’s 1919 discovery of the repetition compulsion (together with his 1914 essay ‘On
Narcissism [. . .]’) provoke his return to the abandoned manuscript ‘The Uncanny’; these
discoveries no doubt would have transformed Freud’s findings in the already-published joke
book as well. In addition to proposing a relationship between Freud’s work in ‘The
Uncanny’ and in The Joke, this essay explores the eruption and suppression of laughter in and
by Hoffmann’s ‘The Sandman’ in order to speculate about how Freud might have theorized
the joke-work had he rewritten the joke book, too, later in his career.
There are several indications of a furtive communication between Freud’s joke book
and his revised essay ‘The Uncanny’—a correspondence Freud never pursues. His rhetorical
strategies in the two texts indicate a structural similarity between the uncanny and the comic.
He begins ‘The Uncanny’ by pleading special dullness of perception with respect to his
subject matter: ‘[The author]’, he writes,
must plead guilty to a special obtuseness in the matter, where extreme sensitivity would be
more in place [am Platze]. It is long since he has experienced or heard of anything which
could have made an uncanny impression on him [den Eindruck des Unheimlichen gemacht
 Beeman 3
hätte], and he must start by transferring [or displacing: sich hineinversetzen] himself into that
state of feeling [for the uncanny].4

Freud’s introductory confession reveals his difficulty in ‘placing’ himself to best advantage
with respect to the uncanny. According to Freud, if he were in the right place—which is to
say if he were more sensitive to uncanny experience—he would not have to ‘displace’
himself before he could analyse uncanny effects. And yet the reader may also presume that
Freud’s self-displacement is merely a rhetorical trick by which he simultaneously claims an
objective distance from his subject matter and a privileged immersion in it. Surely to
displace and destabilize the sovereign subject is among the primary achievements of uncanny
experience; but since Freud is so exceptionally insensitive to being displaced by uncanniness,
he will begin by ‘displacing himself’. It may be that if Freud had been ‘in the right place’ for
sensing the uncanny, he would have been in the wrong place for analysing it. The uncanny
must not overtake the theorist helpless and unawares; rather, Freud willfully ‘arouse[s] in
himself the possibility of experiencing it’.5 Freud claims to be volunteering himself, as it
were, to a personal experience of the subject at hand.
The verb sich hineinversetzen, translated in the English Standard Edition as ‘to
translate oneself’, means literally ‘to put oneself in a person’s position’. Jumping ahead, we
may remark preliminarily that this formulation resonates with the language in Freud’s earlier
book on jokes, in which he supposes both that the listener derives pleasure by putting himself
in the joker’s place, and that the straight-faced joker derives pleasure by putting himself in
the place of his laughing listener. In both texts, Freud’s difficulty in pinning down the
subject of uncanny or comic experience is at stake.6 He never fully abolishes his uncertainty
as to whether something can be perceived generally as uncanny or comic, or whether to the
contrary such effects are contingent upon a limited, subjective point of view. It is for this
reason that Freud appeals so often in these two texts to a kind of majority rule, approaching
scientific objectivity by claiming that ‘most people’ will agree for instance that coincidences
are uncanny or that a joke about someone’s mother is funny. The difficulty in locating the

4
Sigmund Freud, ‘Das Unheimliche’, in Gesammelte Werke chronologisch geordnet, Zwölfter Band: Werke aus
den Jahren 1917-1920 (Frankfurt am Main: S. Fischer Verlag, 1947), pp. 229-68 (p. 230), my emphasis.
Referenced hereafter as DU. ‘Er [...] muß sich erst in das Gefühl hineinversetzen’. My translations of this essay
alter only where necessary those of James Strachey in ‘The Uncanny’, in The Standard Edition of the Complete
Psychological Works of Sigmund Freud, vol. 17 (London: Hogarth Press, 1966-74), pp. 218-52. Strachey’s
English translation will be referenced hereafter as TU.
5
Ibid. ‘die Möglichkeit desselben in sich wachrufen’.
6
We will return to this difficulty in conclusion.
 Beeman 4
subject of uncanny and comic experience is duplicated and magnified in Freud’s inability to
place himself as theorist with respect to these subjective effects. Freud the theorist can be
neither identical with nor entirely separate from the Freud who breaks down laughing or who
apprehends the uncanny.
The original displacement to which Freud allegedly subjects himself in ‘The
Uncanny’ contrasts starkly with his theoretical stance in the joke book, where his
investigation is guided from the start by his unmediated subjective feeling for what is funny;
Freud judges a joke’s success according to a single criterion: whether or not it makes him
laugh. His investigation proceeds from an ongoing collection of such jokes culled from
personal conversations and from his vast reading of contemporary periodicals, literary texts,
and canonical investigations of jokes and comedy from the history of aesthetics.
Nevertheless, if Freud’s joke book emerges from a collection of jokes that make him laugh,
he is not content to remain in the privileged yet vulnerable position of one doubled over in
mirth. As he confesses: ‘When we are laughing really heartily at a joke, we are not exactly in
the most suitable state of mind to inquire into its technique. That is why we have some
difficulties in getting into these analyses.’7 The fundamental operation in Freud’s analysis of
jokes is therefore to ‘de-jokify’ (entwitzen) or ‘reduce’ (reduzieren) each joke in turn,
depriving it of comic effect by stripping the thought-content from its ‘jokey’ form in order to
discover the technique that makes it work.8
In ‘The Uncanny’, Freud presents himself as a foreigner to the subject who ventures
forward for the purpose of analysing it, while in The Joke, he presents himself as an intimate
acquaintance of jokes who must estrange himself from laughter and neutralize the joke’s
power over him in the name of analysis. Why does Freud wade into the uncanny while he
holds the joke at arm’s length—and all for the purpose of ‘placing’ himself such that it will
be possible to theorize these threatening and infectious objects? The apparent opposition
between Freud’s rhetorical strategies in the two texts is belied by their common aim. In both
cases, Freud collides with the impossibility of finding and maintaining the appropriate
distance from his object of enquiry. This suggests a first point of contact between the

7
Sigmund Freud, The Joke and Its Relation to the Unconscious, trans. by Joyce Crick (New York: Penguin
Classics, 2002), p. 39. Referenced hereafter as JRU.
8
Freud, JRU. On Freud’s terms for de-jokifying the joke, see Crick’s Preface, p. xxx. Freud explains his
operation thus: ‘To discover the technique of this witticism, we will have to submit it to that reductive procedure
which eliminates the joke by altering its mode of expression’ (JRU 15).
 Beeman 5
uncanny and the comic in Freud: in both investigations, Freud strives to assume a view of his
material that is simultaneously objective and limited to the perspective of a unique subject.
Yet there is more than a vague rhetorical similarity playing between the two texts, and
more than a structural identity between the uncanny and the comic. One suspects that in
‘translating himself’ into a feeling for the uncanny, Freud is ‘translating himself’ out of a
feeling for the comical. That he fails to isolate his object by way of this original translation is
clear: after announcing that uncanny experience is always the effect of ‘an unintended
recurrence of the same situation’, Freud concedes that this formula is not reversible—that is,
not all ‘unintended recurrences of the same thing’ are uncanny: ‘Mark Twain’, for one,
‘succeeded [. . .] in turning [unintended repetition] into something irresistibly comic’.9 Nor is
this the only example from ‘The Uncanny’ that ambiguously invokes both effects. Freud’s
whole argument in that essay recalls to his mind a joke which he reproduces for the reader.
In support of his formula that the uncanny (unheimlich) is something that was once familiar
or homey (heimisch) from which we have been estranged through repression, Freud
juxtaposes his clinical observation that neurotic men often find female genital organs
uncanny (the one place where everyone has been ‘at home’ at least once) with the ‘joking
saying’ that ‘Love is home-sickness’.10 The proximity between the uncanny and the comic
emerges once more in closing, when Freud remarks that emotional effects are largely
independent of the subject-matter which prompts them.11 He cites the example of a character
from Nestroy’s Der Zerrissene who is surprised to discover what appears to be a host of
angry ghosts though he killed only one man: ‘what must be uncanny to him’, Freud observes,
‘has an irresistibly comic effect on us.’12
Following Freud’s cue, Robert Pfaller has elaborated an argument for why the same
thing may be comic to one person and uncanny to another. 13 Identifying in both a common

9
Freud, TU 237. See also 246.
10
Freud, TU 245.
11
This observation coyly confesses the absurdity of Freud’s initial search for ‘the uncanny’ in a list of themes.
12
Freud, TU 252.
13
Cf. Robert Pfaller, ‘The Familiar Unknown, the Uncanny, the Comic: The Aesthetic Effects of the Thought
Experiment’, in Lacan: the Silent Partners, ed. by Slavoj Žižek (New York: Verso, 2006), pp. 198-216. In the
only other attempt to my knowledge to trace the structural identity between the uncanny and the comic (which
he identifies as two possible effects of thought experiments), Pfaller suggests in conclusion that ‘the comic is
what is uncanny for others’ (209, his emphasis). He questions his own findings: ‘If the comic and the uncanny
are based in equal measure upon suspended illusion, then how can the difference between them, which I wished
to express in my formula, be contained in a theory?’ (211). Pfaller concludes that ‘by differentiating two levels
of illusion [. . .] we [are] able to justify the formula [that the comic is what is uncanny for others][…] This
allows us to explain both these aesthetic effects as the result of a thought experiment’ (213).
 Beeman 6
relationship to the thought experiment, Pfaller argues that comic and uncanny effects result
from the suspension of two different types (or ‘levels’) of illusion. This allows him to
maintain the structural identity of the comic and the uncanny while still describing the
difference between them with a single theory. And yet it would be possible to dwell longer
on the question Pfaller poses himself: if we admit the structural identity between the uncanny
and the comic, then ‘how can the difference between them [. . .] be contained in a theory?’.14
Freud’s closing observation in “The Uncanny”—that what appears uncanny to one
person may appear comic to another—is a necessary step toward grasping the relationship
between the two effects; yet to content ourselves with the conclusion that the difference
between the uncanny and the comic is a matter of perspective is to underestimate the
fundamental instability of the psychic identifications on which these aesthetic responses rely.
In a previous example drawn from Herodotus, Freud determines that ‘we have no [uncanny]
sensations, for we put ourselves in the thief’s place, not in [the place of the princess who is
left holding a severed hand while the thief escapes]’.15 Freud’s claim here does not ring true
with his own findings in the 1914 essay ‘On Narcissism’ about the ongoing, ever incomplete
drama of identifications upon which our egos are built. The uncanny and the comic are not
only two possible but mutually exclusive responses to the same material; the two effects may
be closely wed in the experience of one person. Not only can what is comical or uncanny flip
into the other in our experience: we may even be unsure which of these effects we are sensing.
Both the comic and the uncanny ‘displace’ us, as Freud’s efforts to maintain his theoretical
footing during his forays into these topics reveal.16
* * *
Freud’s single reference to the uncanny in his earlier joke book reveals the vast
theoretical distance separating the two works, and indicates the direction that an imaginary
‘revision’ of the joke book might have taken. According to Freud, the joke has ‘a kernel of
pleasure from words and nonsense and a shell of pleasure from lifting [inhibitions]’.17 The

14
Pfaller 211.
15
Freud, TU 252, his emphasis and mine respectively.
16
Even what might seem to be the only sure difference between the uncanny and the comic—that the former
destabilizing experience causes us un-pleasure while the latter causes pleasure—is less than certain. As Freud
points out in The Joke, laughter is not always pleasurable; similarly, it is easy to find examples of people who
seek out uncanny experiences as others seek thrills. Both effects suggest an analogy with ‘tickling’, which
arouses pleasure and un-pleasure in equal measure.
17
Freud, JRU 79.
 Beeman 7
kernel of childish pleasure from ‘playing with one’s own words’18 must be protected by a
‘shell’ of sense or meaningfulness to secure the joke against the later objections of critical
reason. Repeating (whether uncannily or comically) the theoretical maneuvers from his
Three Essays on the Theory of Sexuality, written simultaneously and published in the same
year, Freud posits three ‘stages’ of the joke’s ‘development’ in psychic life. The first of these
stages survives in the joke’s kernel of pleasure, which Freud refers to as an ‘original’ and
‘pure’ pleasure.19 The original pleasure of ‘playing with one’s own words’ arises from ‘the
repetition of what is similar’ and ‘the rediscovery of what is familiar’.20
Freud is content to understand ‘familiarity’ here as the opposite of ‘uncanny’
experience; ‘familiarity’, he writes, quoting Groos, is ‘that gentle sense of ease which fills
Faust when he re-enters his study after an uncanny encounter’.21 Groos’s false memory of
the famous scene, echoed by Freud, is most telling, for Faust does not escape the uncanny
poodle by retreating to his study. Faust’s ‘uncanny encounter’ at the end of scene two is with
a black poodle that follows him back into his study. Faust’s ‘pleasure in familiarity’ therefore
cannot be understood as ‘original’ or ‘pure’—it is achieved only through a transformation,
displacement, or ‘translation’ of uncanny experience into a familiar form; Faust needs the
poodle in order to recognize the ‘familiarity’ of his cozy study. At the same time, Faust’s
precarious and secondary ‘sense of ease’ is unsettled by the dog’s sustained snarling.22
The literary example Freud summons not only fails to support, but even contradicts
his early belief that human experience discloses an original pleasure in familiarity. Of
course, Freud believes that the original pleasure in familiarity is available only to children.
For adults, ‘it is out of the question [. . .] to obtain any pleasure from those sources of
rediscovery of what is familiar’ unless the objections of critical reason can be overcome and
inhibitions lifted.23 Through the various techniques of the joke, Freud argues, the adult
manages to access the original pleasure in familiarity. Yet even in his discussion of
children’s pleasure, Freud oscillates uneasily between two formulations: he refers not only to
the ‘pleasure in familiarity’, but also to ‘[the child’s] old familiar pleasure [die ihm vertraute

18
Ibid. 139.
19
Cf. Freud, JRU 116-17 and 202.
20
Ibid. 123.
21
Freud, JRU 116.
22
Johann Wolfgang von Goethe, Faust: A Tragedy, 2nd edition, trans. by Walter Arndt (New York: W. W.
Norton & Company, 2001), p. 33.
23
Freud, JRU 123.
 Beeman 8
Lust]’.24 Freud’s substitution of the second formulation for the first unsettles the distinction
between ‘original pleasure’ and ‘familiarity’. Does familiarity come before pleasure or the
reverse? If it is the familiarity of the pleasure that is pleasurable, then what made it
pleasurable the first time? The idea of ‘pleasure in familiarity’ precludes the possibility that
such pleasure could be original, for familiarity requires repetition; thus the pleasure in
familiarity, if it exists, must be secondary.
Freud admits as much already in the 1905 joke book, where his definition of ‘play’ (in
the sense of children playing with words) gives repetition priority over pleasure: in the course
of playing, children ‘come upon pleasurable effects arising from the repetition of what is
similar, the rediscovery of what is familiar’—an accidentally discovered pleasure which then
‘encourage[s] children in the habit of playing’.25 However, Freud immediately withdraws
from his insight that the compulsion to repeat comes before any pleasure in playing with
words when he reasserts that pleasure is the motivation for play. He concludes accordingly
that the first stage of the joke is ‘play with words and thoughts, motivated by certain
pleasurable effects’.26
In ‘The Uncanny’, Freud amends his earlier misreading of the relationship between
uncanniness and the so-called ‘pleasure in recognition’ or pleasure in familiarity. Here,
Freud no longer maintains that familiarity is opposed to uncanniness; he argues instead that
familiarity belongs to the very structure of the uncanny. ‘Unheimlich’, he writes, ‘is in some
way or other a sub-species of heimlich’.27 Uncanny experience is an un-pleasurable
rediscovery of what is most familiar, which means that it cannot be true, as he claims
previously in his joke book, that ‘the rediscovery of what is familiar’ is ‘pleasurable in
itself’.28 In short, ‘familiar’ is not a qualifier that describes the contents of two identical
experiences; rather, ‘familiarity’ is a form of experience that is produced through repetition in
the first place. Repetition comes before recognition, and thus before the pleasure in
recognition.29 This means that a subject does not have priority over the uncanny repetition he

24
Ibid. 124.
25
Ibid. 123, my emphasis.
26
Ibid. 123, his emphasis. The Joke was of course written long before Freud had discovered what he later calls
the compulsion to repeat.
27
Freud, TU 226.
28
Freud, JRU 117, my emphasis.
29
In his excellent chapter on Freud’s joke book, Samuel Weber compares Freud’s understanding of child’s play
in the joke book with his strikingly evolved analysis of child’s play in Beyond the Pleasure Principle, which
Freud set aside to revise his essay ‘The Uncanny’; Weber shows similarly that in Freud’s 1920 account of play,
 Beeman 9
experiences: it is not that ‘I’ repeat something—it is that something repeats itself in me;
indeed, the ‘I’ or ‘self’ emerges through the struggle to master the structure of involuntary
repetition that defies its effort at self-containment.
In Hoffmann’s tale, this ‘something’ which reproduces itself in Nathanael is nothing
other than the mad laughter that rips out of him by his own account. The true subject of
Hoffmann’s enigmatic tale is not Nathanael, but the repetitive force of a disembodied
laughter. In the opening lines of his first letter (the epistle with which Hoffmann’s text
commences), Nathanael relinquishes his narrative priority to this anonymous force: ‘I must
tell you what happened [. . .] but as soon as I think it, it laughs crazily out of me’.30
Nathanael opens his account by warning us that his narrating voice has been contaminated,
and is no longer the index of a single, discrete subject; he introduces himself as a kind of
narrating puppet animated by mad laughter that exceeds him.
* * *

the pleasure in recognition is no longer ‘original’, for it comes after repetition, and results from the child’s
serious attempts to master disturbing experiences by repeating them in play. Cf. Weber, Samuel, ‘The Joke:
Child’s Play’, in The Legend of Freud, expanded edition (Stanford: Stanford University Press, 2000), pp. 121-37
(p. 133). Between 1905 and 1919, Freud’s grasp of the relation of priority between pleasure and repetition has
been overturned; this suggests, however, that disturbing events will not necessarily be mastered through
compulsive repetition. Further, such repetition precedes the constitution of the stable, autonomous subject who
could have ‘intended’ to repeat... This drama of repetition through which a subject struggles to emerge
moreover is never concluded, but is merely repeated, and with varying ‘effects’. As Freud’s own work reveals,
‘unintentional repetition’ can be experienced as comic or as uncanny.
30
Hoffmann, S 11, my emphasis. ‘Nun soll ich Dir sagen, was mir widerfuhr. Ich muß es, das sehe ich ein, aber
nur es denkend, lacht es wie toll aus mir heraus.’ In her essay, ‘Grauenvolle Stimme. Das Lachen in E. T. A.
Hoffmanns Der Sandmann’, Anne Fleig argues that the horrible (devilish) laughter of Coppelius and Coppola in
‘The Sandman’ is the ‘aesthetic form [Erscheinungsform] in which a border between voice and writing,
madness and reality, as well as between enlightened knowledge and romantic poetry, is muddied’ (Cf.
‘Grauenvolle Stimme [...]’, in LachArten: Zur ästhetischen Repräsentation des Lachens vom späten 17.
Jahrhundert bis zur Gegenwart, ed. by Arnd Beise, Ariane Martin and Udo Roth (Bielefeld: Aisthesis Verlag,
2003), p. 115, my translation). While I will propose that laughter in ‘The Sandman’ does not disrupt analysis,
but is a literary construction that must be read or ‘cut’ out of the story through a labor of interpretation, Fleig
discusses the story’s explicit uses of the word ‘laughter’—usually in reference to Coppelius and Coppola; thus
she understands laughter in the story as something that is opposed to writing, speech, and the sense-making
project of subjects of discourse. Fleig argues that laughter muddies a series of binary oppositions drawn from
the confrontation—contemporary for Hoffmann—of enlightenment knowledge and romantic poetry. She denies
that laughter ‘stands for’ any one thing; rather, it erupts between two non-parallel orders (Fleig 131).
Nevertheless, Fleig implicitly assigns a particular meaning to laughter in the story elsewhere in her analysis:
laughter symbolizes the inability to make distinctions; thus Nathanael laughs for the first time only when he
goes mad, signaling his inability to distinguish between external and internal reality, or, between reality and
fiction (Fleig 129-30). Fleig’s ready association of ‘laughter’ with ‘madness’ tends to flatten the complex
emergence of a thoroughly contagious, yet encoded laughter through our reading of the story, as well as
flattening the fundamental struggle of subjects to survive the uncanny experience of laughing—whether or not
they are ‘mad’.
 Beeman 10
Our reading of Hoffmann’s ‘The Sandman’ as a joke or failed joke hinges on the
figure of Olimpia, a mechanical doll with whom Nathanael falls in love; needless to say, his
love is merely an attachment to the doll as a prosthesis and prop for his imperiled narcissism,
and results from his impression that she is more responsive to his poetic version of the
Sandman story than his rationalistic fiancée Clara could ever be. Olimpia is capable of only
one endlessly reiterated response: ‘Ach – Ach – Ach!’.31 The narrator calls this sound a
‘groan’ or ‘moan’;32 nonetheless, one may ask whether the mechanical doll’s ‘Ach, Ach,
Ach’ is not instead a laugh that Nathanael misreads. Remarkably, when Coppola the Italian
glasscutter comes to reclaim his glass eyes from the body of the clockwork puppet crafted by
Spalanzani, a peal of laughter is unleashed from the confusion of their angry voices: ‘ha ha ha
ha!’.33 The narrative does not reveal whose laughter is being overheard. This ejaculation is
separated from Olimpia’s first sounds by several pages and much drama, but it is impossible
not to remark the correspondence between this disembodied laughter and the doll’s
characteristic sigh.
The question of whether Olimpia’s response to Nathanael’s stories should be read as
moan or as laugh all depends on where one begins to read, recalling the anonymous
narrator’s earlier confession that he did not know where to begin the story, and so ‘decided
not to begin at all.’34 The brevity and sharpness of the ‘sigh’; the piling up of three in a row;
the exclamation point that inexplicably punctuates them: all this contributes to the unwinding
and re-articulation of ‘Ach, Ach, Ach!’ into ‘ha ha ha!’. We must note here that the matter
of articulation—the question of where emphases and breaks should be located—is raised
repeatedly by Hoffmann’s tale with respect to the human body and its articulations. In the
scene just mentioned, the doll is dragged and battered by the two men whose collaboration
spawned her. The scene of Olimpia’s disassembly repeats Nathanael’s childhood screen
memory, in which Coppelius seizes him ‘so violently that [his] joints cracked, and unscrewed
[his] hands and feet, screwing them on again, now here, now there’. 35 Nathanael’s screen
memory of this original trauma involves the re-articulation of his body.

31
Hoffmann, S 40.
32
Ibid. The verb used is ‘seufzen’.
33
Ibid. 44.
34
Ibid. 27. ‘Ich beschloß gar nicht anzufangen’. As previously noted, the narrator’s hesitation to begin figures
the ambiguous status of Hoffmann’s tale, which hovers between the uncanny and the comic—and which can
present itself as uncanny only by explicitly and forcefully prohibiting our laughter.
35
Ibid. 17-18.
 Beeman 11
In the repetition of the scene, with the doll Olimpia standing in for Nathanael, it is not
only a body, but also inarticulate sounds that are disjointed and re-articulated. The ‘ha ha ha
ha’ that erupts from the two fighting men disassembles and translates, as it were, Olimpia’s
empathetic response to Nathanael’s story—which itself is a synecdoche for Hoffmann’s tale
as a whole. These unscrambled sounds no longer seem to respond to an uncanny tale, but to a
comic one; they are no longer empathetic, but unsympathetic, even hostile. A ‘cutting’ voice
is attributed to Olimpia when she sings, but here it is her own words that are cut; laughter
emerges as the self-laceration of an automaton’s mechanical voice.36 The laughter unleashed
from Olimpia’s re-articulated moans belatedly reconstitutes the tale of the Sandman as comic.
The ‘translation’ we have wrested from the scene of Olimpia’s disassembly—which
amounts to a conversion of the tale’s modality from tragic to comic—is not, however,
without a difference. ‘Ha’ is an imperfect mirror image of ‘Ach.’ What is the significance of
this difference, which indeed threatens to obscure completely the correspondence between
‘ach!’ and ‘ha!’? We may approach this question by observing the strikingly varied levels of
sensitivity and insensitivity exhibited by the figures in Hoffmann’s tale to what may be called
the difference in translation.
The Sandman (in the form of his avatars, Coppelius and Coppola) performs a series of
translations on Nathanael’s words and experience. Like Clara, Nathanael is oblivious to
these minor shifts, or rather, he sees through the differences in translation too readily, and
imagines he has rediscovered ‘the (familiar) original’ behind every new version. Thus when
the advocate Coppelius disappears from his life, but is succeeded by a Piedmontese
mechanician with similar features called Giuseppe Coppola, Nathanael does not hesitate over
the difference between ‘Coppola’ and ‘Coppelius’; rather, he complains astonishingly that
Coppelius ‘has not even changed his name’.37
Both Clara and Nathanael are subject to the confusion and conflation of proper names,
though we must add that with the narrator as intermediary, it is ultimately impossible to
determine who or what is responsible for the slippage between names that should pick out
distinct subjects in this text. Instead of ‘the advocate Coppelius’ and ‘the lens grinder
Coppola’, Clara writes that she ‘could joke about the advocate Sandman and the weather-

36
Ibid. 38. Olimpia sings with a ‘heller, beinahe schneidender Glasglockenstimme’, my emphasis.
37
Hoffmann, S 20. ‘Zudem hat Coppelius nicht einmal seinen Namen geändert. Er [. . .] nennt sich Giuseppe
Coppola’.
 Beeman 12
glass handler Coppelius’.38 In the same breath in which Nathanael—or the narrator—denies
the identity of ‘Coppelius’ and ‘Coppola’, the name of the former is misspelled, producing a
hybrid of the two names: ‘Coppelii’.39 When Spalanzani and Coppola fight over the doll, the
narrator reports their intermingling accusations only to add (perhaps from the perspective of
the eavesdropping Nathanael) that ‘it was the voices of Spalanzani and the hideous
Coppelius’.40 Following this misidentification of Coppola’s voice, Spalanzani himself seems
to confirm that Coppola and Coppelius are one and the same: as Coppola runs away with the
now ‘deceased’ doll, Spalanzani screams that ‘Coppelius – Coppelius stole my best
automaton from me’.41
Both Coppelius and Coppola are foreigners, which links the Sandman-effect to a
certain havoc that is wreaked on the German language—re-articulating it and no doubt
making it either comical or uncanny. Nathanael confirms that Coppola is Piedmontese: ‘one
hears it in his accent’.42 Likewise, ‘Coppelius,’ Nathanael writes, ‘was German, but as it
seemed to me, not a real one’.43 Coppola’s Italianate diction is rendered by substituting the
letter ‘k’ where there should be a ‘c’ or a ‘ch’; thus he says ‘skön’ instead of ‘schön’ for
‘beautiful’.44 This substitution of ‘k’ for ‘c’ emphasizes precisely the difference between
‘Clara’ and ‘klar’ (which means ‘clear’ in German); Clara’s ‘clear perspective’ on the story is
lost, as it were, in Coppola’s translation. The almost onomatopoetic clarity of her name is
muddied and distorted as though by the accent of a mysterious foreigner. In Hoffmann’s
anglicized spelling, Clara’s very name deforms the German language in exactly the same way
that Coppola’s Italianate accent does—but in the opposite direction: ‘Clara’ substitutes c for k
while Coppola does the reverse.
The ‘difference’ or ‘cost’ of translation emerges briefly in Nathanael’s wounding
realization (twice repeated) that Coppola must be laughing at him because he has ‘paid too
dearly—paid too dearly!’ for the wondrously clear view afforded by the ‘little telescope’ (das
kleine Perspektiv) he has just purchased from Coppola.45 Coppola’s laugh is moreover the

38
Ibid. 23.
39
Ibid. 36.
40
Ibid. 44.
41
Ibid. 45.
42
Ibid. 24. ‘[...] überdem hört man es auch seiner Aussprache an’.
43
Ibid. 24. ‘[…] war ein Deutscher, aber wie mich dünkt, kein ehrlicher’.
44
Ibid. 35.
45
Ibid. 36. ‘Nun ja, meinte Nathanael, er lacht mich aus, weil ich ihm das kleine Perspektiv gewiβ viel zu teuer
bezahlt habe – zu teuer bezahlt!’. For Weber’s remarks on the importance of ‘perspective’ in Hoffmann’s story
 Beeman 13
same ‘loud laugh’ (laut lachen) that Clara promises Nathanael in response to his first plea for
laughter—and which she believes will scare off the horrible Sandman.46 Instead, Coppola
contaminates Clara’s promise of laughter by making good on it where she fails to.
One might say that the Sandman is the force behind the difference and loss in
translation, while Clara resists and defends against any such loss. This is of course to deny
the literary in language; Clara is accordingly bored and confused by poems. While
Nathanael endeavors to express his fear of the Sandman so perfectly that nobody could fail to
grasp it—and while he composes a poem so gripping that it unearths and reanimates in
Nathanael the childhood fear he already has overcome—Clara responds not to the poetry of
the poem, but to its thought-content. She informs Nathanael that the ideas conveyed in his
poem are objectively false. It is then no small irony that Clara’s efforts to hold Nathanael’s
poetry to a scientific, rational and empirical standard of truth end up colluding unwittingly
with the consummately literary force of an original translation. It is Clara’s name that
belongs in a series with Coppelius and Coppola. Critics of Hoffmann’s tale have taken Clara
to be an embodiment of clarity and enlightenment reason on account of her name;
nonetheless, one moves from ‘Clara’ to ‘klar’ or ‘aufgeklärt’ only by way of a translation. It
is the cost of just this move that Hoffmann’s tale weighs.
Editors and translators of Hoffmann, for their part, have lost no sleep over the cost of
translation: after its first appearance, and with the exception of the Standard Edition, the
name ‘Clara’ has been rendered more often as ‘Klara’—Germanizing her, or rather,
domesticating her name, which in German may be less uncanny when spelled with a ‘K.’ But
proper names, like most jokes, do not survive translation. The free translation of Clara’s
name renders opaque the meaning of the letter c’s intrusion in Olimpia’s sigh (‘Ach’); if not
for that ‘c’, readers would discover a perfectly mirroring relationship between the two
possible responses to Nathanael’s tale given within the narrative (‘ah, ah, ah’ and ‘ha, ha,
ha’). The negation of each response by the other illustrates the threat posed by the mirror
image. The mirroring between these two responses would then follow the logic of
Nathanael’s narcissistic love for Olimpia, whose sighing response generates his identity as
‘poet’ belatedly and in reverse (he is a poet not because of his own activity, but only insofar

and in Freud’s theory of the uncanny, cf. Weber, ‘Uncanny Thinking’, The Legend of Freud, pp. 1-34 (p. 18 and
p. 21).
46
Hoffmann, S 36 and 23.
 Beeman 14
as Olimpia as sympathetic listener judges him so), only to destroy him when the same
response is exposed as inhuman and false.
The obfuscating intervention of this ‘c’ between the two letters (a-h-a-h-a) that chase
each other through Hoffmann’s tale from start to finish reveals the way in which Clara
contributes to a loss of meaning through her very resistance against translation—even if it
never reveals where we should begin reading, nor which of the two letters is supposed to
have come before the other. By the time readers encounter Olimpia’s first ‘Ach’, they are
well aware of Clara’s meddling interference in dual relationships: Clara intercepts
Nathanael’s first letter meant for Lothar and reads it herself; she later intervenes in the two
men’s duel, which ends in a three-way avowal of love rather than in a clash of two
perspectives in which one must perish. If the ‘c’ that intrudes between ‘a’ and ‘h’ in
Olimpia’s ‘Ach’ is for ‘Clara’, we might take Clara (who prides herself on communicative
directness and transparency) at her word and see right through it; if the ‘c’ stands instead for
the sliding series Coppelius-Coppola-Clara, its intervention nevertheless functions as a kind
of joint which re-articulates the word, isolating a ‘ha’ between every two c’s. In either case,
laughter erupts—if not for Nathanael, then for us. This interpretation of Olimpia’s suggestive
‘sigh’ is performed by Coppola himself. While both Nathanael and Clara use ‘Ach’ as an
exclamation, Coppola (a ‘foreigner’) exclaims ‘Ah’—and he edits our meddlesome ‘c’ out of
the more common (and more German) ‘Ach’ directly before overcharging Nathanael for a
‘little Perspektiv’.47
In the form of echoing, disembodied laughter that originates outside the tale and
before it begins, we are left, in spite of Clara’s triangulating interventions, with the shadow of
an ineluctably dual relationship.48 Contrary to Freud’s claims in the 1905 joke book,
Hoffmann’s tale reveals that laughter is not the triumph of an already-established, unified

47
Ibid. 35.
48
In his analysis of the difference between Freud’s understanding of child’s play in The Joke and Its Relation to
the Unconscious versus in Beyond the Pleasure Principle, Weber concludes that the ‘pleasure in recognition’
(which Freud identifies as the ‘kernel’ of pleasure in joking) is in fact pleasurable only for the narcissistic ego
(136). Weber takes issue with Freud’s claim that the joke’s ‘kernel’ of pleasure in ‘playing with words’ and
‘shell’ of pleasure in ‘meaning’ are opposed; rather, critical reason ‘inhibits’ the infantile pleasure-in-play ‘only
better to serve the goal that both play and meaning are designed to further: the narcissistic recognition of the
Same’ (ibid.). The Lacanian ‘symbolic’, for Weber, is merely ‘a lure of the Imaginary’, in other words, ‘the
discursive continuation of the ambivalent strategy of narcissism’ (Weber 137).
 Beeman 15
subject over the image, for instance, of another’s body-in-pieces;49 laughter is itself the
cutting and disarticulation of one’s own body. In laughter, I ‘triumph’ over the other who
falls, who stutters, etc., only while miming—indeed reproducing involuntarily in my
laughter—the disarticulation of the body and the speech of the one who falls, who stutters,
etc.
Clara’s intervention obscures the reversibility between the ‘uncanny’ and ‘comic’
responses to the tale; yet she bares the relationship between these two responses in a singular
fashion: Clara is unable to laugh at Nathanael’s story to the same extent and for the same
reason that she finds nothing uncanny in it. Neither the uncanny nor the comic allows its
audience to remain outside that to which it responds; the uncanny and the comic pull us in,
depriving us of the safe distance that might otherwise characterize the relationship between
the subject and the object of aesthetic judgments.
Returning to Freud, does the theorist of these phenomena gain or lose ‘perspective’
insofar as he casts himself as a foreigner to uncanny experience and estranges himself from
jokes by neutralizing their power to make him laugh? What does it mean that, in ‘The
Uncanny’, Freud identifies strongly and indisputably with the humorless and unflappable
Clara throughout his analysis of Hoffmann’s tale? To respond to these questions, we will
have to look more closely at Freud’s 1905 theory of jokes.
* * *
We have noted already the trouble Freud has in identifying the subject of uncanny and
comic experience, and consequently his trouble determining the angle from which these
topics should be approached. This difficulty assumes a most striking aspect in The Joke in
the form of Freud’s fruitless search for what he calls ‘the first person of the joke’. Although
‘the effect of the joke on the listener’ is ‘easier to see’, Freud insists that ‘it is more important
for us to understand the functions the joke performs in the inner life of the person who makes
it’.50 And yet Freud is disappointed in his search for the ‘first person’ of the joke. He means
by this expression not just anyone who repeats a joke they have heard and enjoyed, but rather
the first person to have invented the joke, or more precisely, ‘the person it occurs to’—the

49
Freud considers the familiar example of a child on the playground who laughs at the sight of another child
falling down. ‘For example, if someone slips and falls in the street [. . .] [t]he child will laugh out of a feeling of
superiority or schadenfreude: “You’ve fallen down – I haven’t”’ (Freud, JRU 216).
50
Freud, JRU 128, my emphasis.
 Beeman 16
joke’s origin and author, as it were.51 Despite his eagerness to find the first person of a joke,
only once does Freud offer us a joke made in his presence by a child—a joke which Freud
overheard ‘as it was being born’.52 Even when he catches a joke at the moment of its first
delivery, only a thorough psychoanalysis of the joker could reveal to Freud the ‘subjective
factors determining or favoring the joke-work’53 in the first person—a condition which
invariably is lacking.54 In his frustrated search for ‘the process of joke-formation in the first
person’, Freud complains repeatedly that the process is ‘still shrouded from us [in
darkness]’.55
In his essay ‘On Narcissism’, Freud encounters a similar problem. Narcissism cannot
be observed by the analyst in its original, ‘pure’ state, but only insofar as a patient has chosen
a love object on a narcissistic basis. The origin of the joke, it seems, is equally impossible to
isolate in its author. Freud can get his hands on a joke only when it already has been
transmitted and has become a social process. Freud’s assumption of a unique subject who
originates the joke is undermined by his observation that the process of joke-formation
cannot be fully realized in one person. Two questions about this elusive ‘first person of the
joke’ perplex Freud: firstly, why is it that the first person of the joke can’t laugh at his own
joke? Secondly, why is the first person driven to tell his joke to someone else?56 A joker
cannot enjoy his own joke, cannot even dispense with it alone; rather, the joker compulsively
recruits a third party who serves both as judge of the joke’s quality and as specular double in
whose laughter the joker experiences a lesser, vicarious pleasure. Who then authorizes the
joke? To whom does the joke belong?
Up to this point, we have glossed over the strict distinction Freud draws between ‘the
joke’ and ‘the comic’ in his analysis.57 This is because the distinction ultimately cannot be
maintained. Freud’s first attempt to differentiate the joke from the comic relies on two

51
Ibid. 128.
52
Ibid. 18.
53
Ibid. 138.
54
Cf. John Carey’s illuminating introduction to the Penguin translation: ‘[Freud] never finds, and
psychoanalyses, a joker. Nor does he give us an example of a joke he has himself made up, together with its
psychological origin, as he often does with his dreams. Yet despite his ignorance about the originators of jokes,
it is the originators’ experience that he is intent on recapturing’ (JRU xii).
55
Freud, JRU 160. See also JRU 138 and 149.
56
Ibid. 139 and 149.
57
What Freud calls ‘humor’ is the third distinct category he takes up in The Joke, though his distinction between
‘joke’ and ‘comic’ is the one we will focus on in the context of Hoffmann’s tale.
 Beeman 17
claims: firstly, that ‘the joke is made’ while ‘comedy is found’. 58 This pithy formula is
undermined among other things by an earlier remark of Freud’s:
we say one ‘makes’ a joke, but we sense that when we do so, we are behaving differently
from when we make a judgment or make an objection. A joke has quite outstandingly the
character of a ‘bright idea,’ occurring to us involuntarily. It is not so much that one [knows] a
moment beforehand what joke one is going to make, which one then only needs to clothe in
words. One senses rather something [i]ndefinable, which I would best compare with an
absence, a sudden letting-go of intellectual tension, and then all at once the joke is there, for
the most part simultaneously clad in words.59

A joke appears in the joker’s mind as though from outside. Unlike my other ideas, a joke
appears ‘without my being able to pursue [its] preparatory stages in my thinking’. 60 Jokes are
also often inaccessible to memory; they surface unbidden, yet cannot be recalled at will. The
process of joke-formation in the first person no doubt would have been difficult to analyse
even if Freud had landed a joker on his couch.
Freud reformulates this first reason for distinguishing between jokes and the comic
when he asserts that comic pleasure requires only two subjects: he who laughs, and that at
which he laughs; whereas the joke, according to Freud, requires three subjects: the joker, his
victim (the ‘butt’ of the joke), and his accomplice (the third person, or ‘audience,’ who
laughs). In the comic, then, the person who tells the joke—in Freud’s language, the ‘first
person of the joke’—is missing. (One must recall here that even in the case of the joke, Freud
never manages to pin down the ‘first person’, a figure that haunts his theory of jokes as a kind
of phantom who is witty rather than being uncanny.) Yet the idea that there is no ‘author’ of
the comic (an idea already expressed in the formula that jokes are ‘made’ while comedy is
‘found’) is belied by Freud’s observation that it is possible for a person ‘to make [someone or
something] comic’; one can even make oneself comic by ‘pretending to be clumsy or
stupid’.61 Perhaps the only reason Freud discovers a unique ‘compulsion to transmit’ in the
case of the joke, and no such compulsion in the case of the comic, is that the comic is
discovered in a spectacle or situation that remains unformulated in words. The comic does
not lend itself to further transmission; nevertheless, its structure may be analogous to that of

58
Freud, JRU 175.
59
Ibid. 162. Crick’s translation erroneously negates a clause from Freud’s German text; the English reads ‘that
one does not know a moment beforehand’, etc.
60
Freud, JRU 163.
61
Ibid. 192, my emphasis.
 Beeman 18
the joke—with the single difference that the comic appears to involve only two subjects
because the roles of joker and victim, or joker and audience, are played by the same person.
Freud’s second and by far more important distinction between jokes and the comic (a
division he identifies as ‘the trickiest point in [his] discussion’),62 of course, is his belief that
the joke alone has roots in the unconscious. He writes:
In the course of these investigations into the relations between joke and comedy we have had
revealed to us the distinction which, we must stress, is the most significant one […] We had
to remove the source of pleasure in jokes to the unconscious; we have no occasion to make
the same localization for the comic […] Jokes and the comic are above all distinguished by
their localization in the psyche: the joke is as it were the contribution made to the comic from
the realm of the unconscious.63

Freud does not adequately establish in whose unconscious the joke has roots.64 Is it rooted in
the unconscious of the one who first invents it, or of the one who retells it, or of the third
party who laughs? Observe the way in which the ‘first’ and ‘third person’ of the joke so
seamlessly trade places. No sooner have we heard a joke than we too, like the joke’s author,
are ‘compelled’ to transmit it. Freud allows that the joke process is not complete until the
joke has been recited before a third-person audience—but is the joke process ever complete?
Is the joke’s proper audience ever found?
Freud has not adequately taken account of his own reflection that ‘the joke [. . .] is the
most social of all the psyche’s functions that aim to obtain pleasure’. The joke ‘requires
someone else to participate in the psychical processes it has set going’,65 Freud writes, but he
fails to make the additional observation that the joke never finds the ‘third person’ or
‘someone else’ that it requires. That the joke-process is never fully consummated is the only
explanation for the fact that the ‘compulsion to tell the joke’ does not expire in its first
recital.66 A ‘new joke’, Freud writes, ‘is passed on from one to another like the news of the
latest victory’.67 The joke always already inscribes the scene of its repetition. Freud writes

62
Ibid. 199.
63
Ibid. 200-01, his emphasis.
64
Cf. Carey, JRU xi. As Carey points out, Freud maintains his focus on ‘the first person of the joke’ because
otherwise he would have to forego his cherished analogy between the ‘joke-work’ and the ‘dream-work’.
Having recently published The Interpretation of Dreams, Freud is most eager to maintain a connection between
the two investigations.
65
Freud, JRU 173, my emphasis.
66
Freud refers to this ‘joke drive’ alternately as ‘the urge [Drang] to communicate the joke’ (an urge ‘so strong
that it will quite often ignore weighty second thoughts as long as it is realized’) and the ‘impulse [or drive:
Trieb] to tell the joke’ (JRU 138). For Freud’s passing explanation of our impulse to retell a joke we have
heard, see JRU 148.
67
Freud, JRU 7.
 Beeman 19
that ‘the psychical process of the joke is consummated between the first person, the “I”, and
the third, the person from outside’.68 The first person needs the third person to consummate
his pleasure because of his uncertainty regarding his joke; in other words, the first person is
unable to laugh at his own joke because he is unsure whether or not it is funny. 69 The third
person he recruits, however, cannot remain ‘outside’ the joke as Freud supposes.
The third person’s laughter does not erase the first person’s uncertainty, and certainly
cannot provide, as Freud claims, ‘objective reassurance that the joke-work has been
successful’;70 such laughter in every case is like the laughter of a mechanical doll which
uncannily reflects back to the joker both his own inability to laugh and his narcissistic wish to
have his uncertainty about the joke removed. That the third person cannot remain external to
the joke is revealed not only by his laughter (which draws him into the joke’s conspiracy),
but by his compulsion, likewise, to retell the joke. If the third person cannot remain outside
the joke, neither can he remain outside its uncertainty. All those who tell and retell the joke
are contaminated by its uncertain status. What Freud distinguishes as the ‘first’ and ‘third
person’ of the joke in fact waver indeterminately between these two perspectives; indeed,
when a joke is transmitted, each person identifies with the other.
The analogy Freud draws between the ‘joke-work’ and the ‘dream-work’ breaks down
at the intersection of the subject who jokes or dreams and his social environment: dreams are
asocial productions whose ‘witty’ or ‘jokey’ ways of slipping repressed material past the
mind’s censoring agency cannot be appreciated by others (thus dreams often appear to take
the form of bad or failed jokes), whereas the joke to the contrary is limited and conditioned
by the ability of others to appreciate it.71 This is to say that the joke is insofar as it is social.
The joke is insofar as it does not refer to the obscure workings of one person’s unconscious in
isolation. A joke must be intelligible to others.
A brief consideration of how jokes function socially shows that the person who tells a
joke can never fully author and possess the joke, one the one hand, and on the other hand that
he can never separate himself from the joke enough to claim a safe, objective distance from
its force. One does not ‘possess’ a joke, even if one has written it. Freud’s own discussion of

68
Ibid. 139, my emphasis.
69
Cf. Freud, JRU 139.
70
Ibid. 149, my emphasis.
71
Freud writes that unlike the dream, the joke ‘has to commit itself to the condition of intelligibility’ (JRU 173;
see also 172).
 Beeman 20
the ‘compulsion to transmit the joke’ suggests rather that one is possessed by the joke in
properly demonic fashion. The joke is one of the few forms of discourse that is exempted
from normal attributive practices in our culture: a joke need not be cited, nor is its authorship
marked or recognized in any way—the joke is simply absorbed and retold as one’s own. The
joke thereby achieves the anonymous status of public property or garbage, up for grabs (one
may even be tempted to speak here of an obligation to transmit the joke further in a game of
hot potato). Perhaps the joke is unclaimed because it is dirty, incriminating, or dangerous.
One has the impression that jokes are retold in the service of an exorcism—transmitted like a
disease. It is as though the laughter of others exorcizes the joke’s possession of me. So much
for the joking subject’s incapacity to own the joke he tells.
The complementary impossibility of severing oneself fully from the joke—of pinning
the joke (following Freud) on ‘the first person’ to whom it occurs—is equally demonstrable.
This explains why it is impossible to repeat a joke without implicating oneself in its power.
For instance, the person who repeats a racist joke will be unable to separate himself from the
vile, infecting object itself. A joke is not cited and is not attributed to its ‘original author’ for
the simple reason that it is impossible to repeat the joke from an objective, ‘outside’ position.
Even in hearing the joke—perhaps against one’s will—a subject is pulled into the structure of
the joke and its wildfire spread. We feel guilty when we are made party to a derogatory joke.
The only way to ‘get hold’ of a joke is usually to have heard it told; a person who tries to
repeat a racist or otherwise offensive joke without ‘condoning’ it, as it were (‘I didn’t find it
funny, but here’s what they said…’), will discover that one becomes co-author of the joke,
one re-authorizes the joke simply by repeating it; such a would-be ‘disinterested’ or ‘neutral
joker’ instantly reveals that he is in circulation with a whole community of ‘people who tell
racist jokes’ and may be contaminated by association in the eyes of his new audience.
There is furthermore no way to defend oneself against a joke that one hears. In
Hoffmann’s tale, Clara’s rationalistic self-defense against the power of Nathanael’s ‘joke’ or
‘uncanny tale’ (depending upon how the story is read) reveals that she, too, already has been
struck. Her self-defense is necessarily belated. (Thus the absurd figure one cuts in
defending, hands on hips, even against a joke that wounds: ‘I don’t find that very funny at
all.’) When a joke-teller tries to distance himself from the joke’s conspiracy, it is already too
late: insofar as he has thought of or heard, remembered, and repeated a joke, he has already
been ‘inside’ the joke, an ‘insider’ of the joke—impressed, struck, infected.
 Beeman 21
Shortly before Freud reasserts the priority of studying the joke’s function in the
psychic life of the ‘first person’ to whom it occurs, we find one of the most frightening and
uncanny moments in his theory of jokes: ‘a joke with an aggressive tendency’, Freud writes,
‘creates an army of foes for its enemy, where once there was only one’.72 Although Freud
insists on projecting a ‘first author’ with a unique psychology behind, before, and at the
origin of the joke’s anonymous circulation, the reader suspects Freud of being untrue to his
own insights when he distinguishes an autonomous prime-mover from the sinister ‘army’ of
laughers and jokers in which the individual subject with his discrete ego apparently is erased.
The narrative voice of Hoffmann’s tale confirms such a thoroughgoing intermingling of the
‘first’ and ‘third’ person of the tale; in it, the reader is ever unsure who is telling the story of
the Sandman. Not only are we presented with the folk legend of the Sandman (whose
sources are unknown), along with contradictory retellings of it by Nathanael’s mother and his
nurse; there is also a structure of nested narrators beyond that: the anonymous third-person
narrator, Hoffmann himself, and Nathanael, whose first-person letter (itself a part of the
fiction) appears before anything else because the narrator himself knows not how, nor where,
to begin.73
* * *
The social behavior of the uncanny is identical to the social behavior of jokes. Upon
hearing an uncanny tale, we are subject to the same ‘compulsion’ to retell it in the hopes of
reproducing in others our anxiety and fear. Moreover, the drive to repeat scary stories—as in
the case of jokes—seems to be a product of our uncertainty; we are compelled to transmit
uncanny tales because we are unsure whether or not they are frightening. Just as Freud
concludes that we are driven to tell jokes to third parties because we are unable to laugh at
our own joke,74 we are driven similarly to tell campfire tales because we are unable to be
frightened by our own ghost story. There is a fundamental hesitation in our aesthetic
response to uncanny tales and jokes alike.
In Hoffmann’s ‘The Sandman’, Nathanael inhabits the tale uneasily as character and
narrator (subject and object) by turns, which means that he is at the same time ‘author’,
‘butt’, and ‘third person’ audience of the comic story he relates (for even if the Sandman

72
Freud, JRU 128, my emphasis.
73
For an excellent discussion of the narrative voices and strategies in Hoffmann’s tale, cf. Hertz, Neil, The End
of the Line: Essays on Psychoanalysis and the Sublime (New York: Columbia University Press, 1985).
74
Freud, JRU 149.
 Beeman 22
legend remains uncanny to most readers, Nathanael’s love for the mechanical doll, uncanny
for him, can only be funny to anyone else). Nathanael reveals to us something about the joke
as social process insofar as he doesn’t recognize what is funny about his story, doesn’t ‘get’
the joke, but transmits it nevertheless. The very malfunction of Nathanael’s would-be joke
(which we previously referred to as the clumsy partial burial of the comic in Hoffmann’s tale)
reveals as false Freud’s assumption that there must be an author and first person of the joke
who is someone other than the third person(s) of the joke. For not only is the so-called ‘third
person’ of the joke—who in Freud’s theory finally judges and enjoys the joke where the first
person could not—never found; it is further the case that everyone in the tale (Nathanael and
the anonymous narrator included) is a ‘third person’ to the joke. Hoffmann’s tale shows not
only the way in which nobody can truly originate the joke; it also shows the way in which the
joke can never reach its proper audience: those whose true laughter would lay the joke to rest.
In Freud’s theory, the third person who somehow authentically laughs at the joke is just as
illusory as the first person whose unique unconscious authors the joke. The joke ‘strikes’ us
with a glancing blow. It both strikes its listeners inevitably and inevitably misses its mark.
The joke as social process is never completed, but is constantly engaged in the movement of
the joke’s further transmission.75 This is also to say that neither the joker nor the listener is
ever certain whether or not the joke is funny. The odd way in which Hoffmann’s tale hovers
between the uncanny and the comic manifests the uncertainty that characterizes both these
aesthetic effects in a finite subject’s experience.
* * *
We have claimed that laughter is not the straightforward triumph of a unified
subject’s ego, but is also the momentary cutting and disarticulation of his ego, his body, and
his speech. If this is the case, then the compulsive transmission of uncanny tales and jokes is
a narcissistic drama that is always incomplete. In Hoffmann’s tale, both Nathanael and the
anonymous narrator are ‘compelled’ to transmit the tale of the Sandman, though as the
narrator confesses, ‘nobody asked me to’.76 Both these story-tellers (who point outside the
tale to Hoffmann himself) narrate compulsively, as though to exorcise—through further

75
The joke’s social behavior suggests at many points a more detailed comparison with the power of the
Sandman in Hoffmann’s tale. Weber points out that Hoffmann’s Sandman never arrives but is always ‘coming’
(‘der Sandmann kommt!’)—a situation that describes the force of the uncanny as well as it describes the force of
jokes.
76
Hoffmann, S 26. ‘Mich hat[ . . .] eigentlich niemand nach der Geschichte des jungen Nathanael gefragt.’
 Beeman 23
transmission—the unsettling effects the tale has on them. Nathanael seeks to justify his fear
by reproducing it in others; on the other hand, he simultaneously hopes that others will
respond differently (by laughing) so that he can model his reaction belatedly on theirs.
Nathanael thereby unveils the fundamentally uncanny, secondary nature of laughter: nobody
laughs by himself; otherwise put, nobody is himself when he laughs. Our aesthetic response
to jokes, as to the uncanny, is based on a drama of ego identifications that is always
incomplete.
To transmit a joke is always to laugh at one’s own joke in reverse—to tell the joke
one laughed at rather than to laugh at the joke one tells, but it is no less a narcissistic drama
for the reversal of its terms. Nathanael pleads for his readers to laugh where he is unable to,
as though to reconstitute his response through a belated and apelike mirroring of our laughter.
But the joke, in this case, is transmitted over Nathanael’s head; it spreads through him while
excluding him from its conspiracy. When Olimpia renders to him the laughter he so urgently
required from Clara, Nathanael doesn’t recognize the fulfillment of his wish. Olimpia’s
laughter must remain either unacknowledged or uncanny. What we have called her ‘laughter’
is also none other than Nathanael’s own laughter in occulted form. There is no ‘immediacy’
to laughter in this tale. It is Nathanaels’s unmitigated uncertainty about the uncanny or
comic status of his story that reveals to us the ever uncertain, incomplete nature of the joke in
every case. (For a joke to ‘succeed’ means only that the joker has purged his own uncertainty
about the joke provisionally by transferring it to his listener, who takes it off his hands.)
When the would-be joker pleads for laughter (as Nathanael does at the beginning of
Hoffmann’s tale), the joke and laugher become uncanny. The scene of the joke’s retelling is
unveiled as the mechanical repetition of a million previous scenes, or at least of one: the
scene of ‘reception’ in which the joker heard the joke, was struck, and laughed.
Freud’s theory of jokes unnecessarily assumes that the experience of the first teller of
a joke has priority over the experience of the one who hears it and retells it. Nevertheless,
Hoffmann’s tale has helped us to reopen in Freud’s theory of jokes the question of where to
begin reading the joke process. Just as the question of whether to begin reading the letters a-
h-a-h-a proved to be a pivotal question for Nathanael and for us in Hoffmann’s tale, we have
asked what would happen if Freud had begun reading the social process of the joke not from
its illusory ‘beginning’ to its illusory ‘end’, but in the midst of its always incomplete
 Beeman 24
transmission. The ‘first’ and the ‘third’ persons of the joke cannot be distinguished.77 The
joker’s compulsive retelling of the joke attempts to master an original shattering of the self in
laughter—which is to say that, contra Freud, laughter (both the other’s and my own) comes
before the joke. More precisely, the relationship that obtains between laughter and the joke is
not one of priority; it is impossible to determine whether the joke comes before laughter or
laughter before the joke. Hoffmann’s tale suggests that all those who laugh play Olimpia to
the joker’s Nathanael, just as everyone who laughs is Nathanael as a child, who hears the tale
of the Sandman for the first time and is infected by its repetitive force. 78 No one subject can
author or possess the joke. Like Nathanael, we may even be estranged from laughter’s
‘pleasure’.
* * *
Perhaps we were too quick to identify Freud’s ‘de-jokifying’ or ‘denaturing’ of the
joke as his primary rhetorical strategy in The Joke; perhaps it is rather his insistence on the
immediacy of laughter and on the helpless inevitability of his response that we should be
most suspicious of. Freud accepts the conventional belief in laughter’s immediacy (thus the
necessary immediacy of our ‘getting’ the joke)79 in spite of the fact that the collection of
jokes he dissects includes jokes that have been reiterated by all theoreticians of the joke in the
history of aesthetics—stale academic citations. Freud uses these old jokes whose reputation
as ‘jokes’ precedes their punch—for ‘we must not avoid the obligation of analyzing the same
examples’—but he supplements them with ‘new’ examples: ‘jokes that have made the
greatest impression on us in our life’.80 Most of Freud’s fresh additions happen to be jokes
about Jews, or ‘Jewish jokes’ as he calls them. The layers of uncertainty and self-defense
that lie at the origin of Freud’s collection and theory of jokes—which requires him to
‘denature’ and break each joke in turn—can scarcely be intuited. Nevertheless, his assurance
late in the book that Jews (and not their enemies) must necessarily have originated Jewish

77
In his reading of the uncanny in Hoffmann’s ‘The Sandman’, Weber splendidly demonstrates the
intermingling of first and third person perspectives in the tale’s narrative voice. See especially his analysis of
Hoffmann’s free indirect discourse in the line ‘Clara stood before the glass!’ (Weber 17 and 19).
78
Freud, too, considers in a footnote that the urge to further transmit jokes may be an attempt at mastery. Of
jokes that mislead and annoy the listener, Freud writes: ‘[the listener] then stifles his annoyance by intending to
tell them himself [and thus to mislead and annoy others]’ (JRU 134).
79
See Freud’s remarks on the life-span (birth and death) of topical jokes—which require too much explanation
to be funny once they are out of date (JRU 118-9). He also writes: ‘the joke loses its effect of laughter even in
the third person as soon as he is expected to spend some effort on intellectual work’ (JRU 144).
80
Freud, JRU 7, my emphasis.
 Beeman 25
jokes (he is less concerned about the question of whose hands they may fall into) is
contradicted by an earlier rationalization which reads more like a veiled apology:
Let us choose one of the ‘bath jokes’ dealing with the Galician Jews’ aversion to bathing. For
we do not require any patent of nobility of our examples, we do not ask where they come
from, but only whether they do their job, whether they are able to make us laugh and whether
they deserve our theoretical interest. But Jewish jokes are the very ones that answer these
requirements best.81

It is hard to believe that Freud’s pleasure in these jokes could have been entirely free from
uncertainty, or that it could have had the ‘immediacy’ he claims for laughter.
What to make of the way in which immediacy is evacuated from comic experience in
Hoffmann’s tale? Freud assumes in his joke book that laughter is an automatic discharge or
immediate, reflex-response to the joke; in his essay on the uncanny, to the contrary, he allows
for the literary construction of uncanniness. This means that some work may be required to
‘translate oneself’, as he puts it, into the possibility of uncanny experience—which is to say
that reading and analysis are not external to uncanny experience, nor do they always dispel
the impression of uncanniness: analysis can produce uncanniness in the first place. The
range of what may be uncanny in reading fiction is much greater than what may be uncanny
in lived experience. Readers of Freud’s ‘The Uncanny’ have argued that there is something
literary about uncanny experience even when we encounter it outside of books.82
Our reading of ‘The Sandman’ forces us to ask whether comic experience and its
‘consummation’ in laughter similarly may be a literary construction produced through
writing, reading and analysis. Not without some effort have we ‘cut’ laughter out of
Hoffmann’s tale. Who is to say that it is not what Freud comes close to calling our ‘joke
drive’ (our ‘compulsion to repeat the joke’) and what we have revealed to be its motor—the
compulsion to repeat an original failure to master the uncanny experience of laughing—rather
than a scientific ‘search for clarity’—that compels us to analyze and to read? Such a
conclusion runs counter to Freud’s guiding assumption, in 1905, that analysis, or ‘over-
thinking’, kills laughter and ruins a joke.

81
Ibid. 38-9. Freud’s whole theory of jokes, of course, is a way of asking ‘where jokes come from.’ It takes
the form of a search for the ‘first person’ of the joke.
82
Cf. Hertz, The End of the Line.
 Beeman 26
Bibliography

Carey, John, ‘Introduction’, The Joke and Its Relation to the Unconscious, by Sigmund
Freud, pp. vii-xxviii
Crick, Joyce, ‘Translator’s Preface’, The Joke and Its Relation to the Unconscious, by
Sigmund Freud, pp. xxix-xlii
Fleig, Anne, ‘Grauenvolle Stimme. Das Lachen in E. T. A. Hoffmanns “Der Sandmann”’,
LachArten: Zur ästhetischen Repräsentation des Lachens vom späten 17. Jahrhundert
bis zur Gegenwart, ed. by Arnd Beise, Ariane Martin and Udo Roth (Bielefeld:
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---, ‘Das Unheimliche’, Gesammelte Werke chronologisch geordnet, Zwölfter Band: Werke
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---, ‘Uncanny Thinking’, The Legend of Freud, pp. 1-34

List of Abbreviations

DU ‘Das Unheimliche’
JRU The Joke and Its Relation to the Unconscious
S ‘Der Sandmann’
TU ‘The Uncanny’