Freud on Wit, Humor, and the Comic

Wit

We laugh in complicity with the teller, at a third party (an individual or group-e.g., Clinton, blondes, Norwegians, women, men).  Repressed hostility is directed at this person or group.  Verbal techniques of brevity and surprise-
condensation, displacement, etc. disguise the aggression or sexual content enough to allow pleasurable response of laughter rather than disgust or guilt.  So the pleasure is getting the aggression out without having to feel guilty.

An example from Woody Allen's Annie Hall: "Did you hear they've merged the magazines Commentary and
Dissent?  They're calling the new magazine Dysentery." (Condensation par excellence!)   Allen is implying that both journals are pretentious leftist intellectual pieces of shit, so the aggression is quite pointed.  Note that without this aggression, it wouldn't be funny: think of how you would react if the condensation punchline were "Comment."

Humor

We laugh in complicity with the teller.  If anyone, the butt is him/herself.  The mechanism of the gag is to deflect the pain, usually displacing our worry onto something trivial.  Jewish humor and gay humor often direct the aggression onto the Jew or gay teller him/herself, in order to "forestall" a non-Jew or straight person's aggression, which would feel worse.  Humor usually uses verbal techniques of brevity and surprise, like wit: e.g., condensation, displacement, nonsense.
   
An example from Annie Hall: Alvy, quoting Groucho: "I wouldn't want to join any club that would have me as a member." The pain: rejection by anti-Semites.  Deflected: he
makes humor out of it, makes light of it with a bit of a brain-twister.  The pleasure here is being let off the hook, at least for the moment, from the painful situation.

The Comic

We laugh at a person's actions, appearance, utterances, movements, which are faulty in some way that allows us to feel superior, and which remove authority or dignity from the person in our eyes. The pleasure here is feeling superior to the comic character in some capacity: knowledge, coordination, etc.

Verbally comic: an example might be some dumb stuff the thugs say in Some Like it Hot.