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A close reading of Freud’s splendid work, The Joke and Its Relation to the Unconscious, reveals a number of difficult points concerning the definitions of condensation and of displacement, but also the psychogenesis of wit, which Freud based on a questionable assumption: that children have a natural aptitude to play freely with words and ideas. The Lacanian theory of wit reads like a commentary by Freud. In fact, his doctrine differs in the sense that it identifies wit with full speech, a speech that articulates demand and reveals the subject’s desire. Lacan designed the graph of desire to illustrate this theory. The genesis of this graph must be traced back not only to Saussure, but also to Roman Jakobson’s essay, “Linguistics and Poetics.”