31

Humour is the most social of all the formations of the unconscious and should be seen, first and foremost, as an event. It takes centre stage, at times in the most tragic or hopeless circumstances, when the subject makes a quick-fire retort, armed only with the resources at the disposal of the ‘parlêtre’, as deathlooms. The example given by Freud at the beginning of his treatise on the role of the unconscious in humour is that of a man led to the gallows on a Monday morning and who ironically exclaims ‘Well, this is a good start to the week! ’ This is a paradigm of what we refer to as black, situational or ‘gallows’ humour and it provides the means of thumbing one’s nose at the ‘absolute Master’ of our existence, Death, and beyond this at adopting a stance towards castration through the power of verbal magic. The masochist, ‘humourist supreme’, stages their comic effect as a mirror image of castration, ‘a joke that is not funny at all.’