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Lacan gives pride of place to witticism – Witz – among the formations of the unconscious, arguing that the unconscious mind is ‘laughing out loud’. Freud provides an inventory of the various mechanisms involved in producing witticisms in his book on the subject (and also in the Traumdeutung and Psychopathology of Everyday Life), while Lacan identifies witticism as being a twist of the signifier. Lacan shows how puns give birth to a new meaning for a third person, but it was his audience of student-cum-analysts whom he liked to see ‘doubling up with laughter’ and who, at times, played the role of ‘Dritte Person’.