SOURCE: Brauner, David. “Masturbation and Its Discontents, or, Serious Relief: Freudian Comedy in Portnoy's Complaint.” Critical Review, no. 40 (2000): 75-90.

In the following essay, Brauner explores the comedic aspects of Portnoy's Complaint, contending that the novel is based on the unresolved tension between Roth's impulse “to treat psychoanalysis comically, and to treat comedy psychoanalytically.”

It has been more than thirty years since the first publication of one of the most infamous post-war novels, Philip Roth's Portnoy's Complaint (1969). Although it still outrages many readers—in my experience of teaching it to undergraduates more because of its misogyny than because of the obscenity which excited so much indignation at the time—and delights many others, its rhetorical complexity (in particular its juxtaposition of comic and psychoanalytic discourses) tends to go unremarked.

Most studies of Philip Roth make much of his comedy, and some see it as his defining characteristic, but few...