In this seminar, we will read Freud’s Jokes and Their Relation to the Unconscious (Der Witz und seine Beziehung zum Unbewußten) and the first part of Jacques Lacan’s seminar The Formations of the Unconscious from 1957-58 in which he introduces his audience to the core thesis that the “unconscious is structure like a language” through a reading of Freud’s book on der Witz.  The class is both an introduction the problem of the unconscious as it is conceived by Freud and Lacan and to the problem more generally of the meaning of jokes, comedy, and humor, and the interrelation between sense and nonsense. Why are jokes so often both disturbing and pleasurable and thus disturbingly pleasurable and pleasurably disturbing?  Why do they so often make such clever use of language through the linguistic play, the use of puns, or logical fallacy? For both Freud and Lacan, jokes are not just idle fun but something to be taken utterly seriously: a human, all too human, practice that brings to fore the precarity of the sense that human being makes of the world. Jokes and more broadly, the comical attests to the fact that the human animal does not make sense and is thus condemned to impossible task of making sense of this nonsense. This class is designed to be complimentary to the seminar “Introduction to Lacan” offered by Amanda Holmes in the philosophy department.