Gather Your Wits - Esther

Youth Making a Face, Adriaen Brouwer

You can laugh. It’s fine. You won’t get thrown out of the gallery.

There’s an old-fashioned concept of art as a serious, weighty subject.

Told another way, humorous art is considered lowbrow, unworthy, devoid of merit. Similar to TV, art was supposed to enlighten, inspire & raise up the viewer, provide them with education & instruction. Hah! Look how that turned out.

Anonymous, Southern Netherlands, Satirical Diptych

If we accept that art can encompass & reflect all aspects of human life & more, then there have to be times it’s allowed to be humorous. Humour is for everyone that gets it. It’s universal & inclusive, although we could argue about what we regard as funny. Who couldn’t do with a laugh right now? If humour isn’t a crucial part of your life, I sincerely don’t know how you get through it. As ever, art is there to help us out.

Philips Galle, Head of a Fool

It’s rarely a good idea to analyse why something is funny. When you have to explain a joke to someone that doesn’t get it the first time, the humour is killed stone dead.

In an attempt to find ways to ruin today’s visual jokes for you, I went in search of “science.” Science never lets me down & the science I found (here: https://theconversation.com/science-deconstructs-humor-what-makes-some-things-funny-64414) explains what makes jokes funny by categorising them under different theories:

The Superiority Theory – an often mean-spirited look at others & possibly their adversities that makes you feel like you’re better than them or glad something’s not happening to you.

The Relief Theory – something awful is happening or being talked about & the tension builds, but PHEW! It’s turned into something funny!

The Incongruity Theory – putting unexpected things or ideas together that don’t belong together for a laugh. The element of surprise.

The Benign Violations Theory – things you shouldn’t be laughing at. But you are. You dreadful, dreadful person. It might be harmless but you should still be ashamed of yourself.

Lombard School, c.1700 Cats Being Instructed in the Art of Mouse-Catching By an Owl

If you can make people laugh, they’ll forgive you many misdeeds. & don’t most people have a darker element to their humour these days? Doesn’t the act of laughing at certain things shame you into gasping, sucking in air or giggling behind your hand? Laughter is a release, whether we are ashamed of ourselves or not.

As well as jokes, it turns out these “scientific” theories actually work when applied to art. The incongruous is at the core of Surrealism & confronting taboos of all kinds is a key feature of modern art & always finds an audience.

William Wegman

But is it FUNNY?

As with all opinions, this is wildly subjective but I’ve collected a few pieces that manage to raise this writer’s reluctant smile. I’m putting satire, memes, comics & cartoons aside here, since there are entire blogs-in-waiting for these subjects. Nor am I selecting work that has once-fashionable symbolic or coded humour. I’m sticking to visual art (paintings, drawings, photographs) that can actually get a cackle out of me in varying degrees of uproariousness. They probably say more about me than I’d like you to know. (As an aside, writing about this has made me feel I’m baring my soul & I’m now slightly worried you won’t find my choices funny. This makes me feel somewhat insecure, which goes to show how fundamental humour is to our being).

Pieter Brueghel the Younger, The Flatterers

There has been humour (intended or otherwise) in art for centuries, even fine art. Even among the Dutch masters. Take Rembrandt’s Good Samaritan etching. If you’re not familiar with it, yes, that dog is taking a poop. & if you don’t think the method The Angel Departing From the Family of Tobias takes to disappear into the heavens isn’t a little bit silly, I just don’t know what to tell you.

Gerard van Honthorst frequently depicted people enjoying themselves or laughing but the most universally & contemporarily understood work may well be Smiling Girl, a Courtesan, Holding an Obscene Image. I think it speaks for itself…

& in a similar vein, Jan Steen leaves us in no doubt about what’s going on here in Wine is a Mocker. & so here we are on our Superiority Theory high ground.

Grandiose, pretentious, arrogant. If you thought these were negative traits, you were right however Salvador Dalí made a career out of them to sometimes hilarious effect. He’d strive to make himself as much a work of art as anything else. You might find him creepy. Sorry but that’s kind of funny too (see: Benign Violations Theory probably). The face-pulling, the showing off & general mucking about in front of a camera (not his own) demonstrates an endearing (Dalíesque or Pythonesque?) willingness to look stupid for our amusement.

On the other hand, his artworks are probably more witty or clever than laugh aloud funny. Then again, I know a burning giraffe is no laughing matter, let alone a corridor of them, but it’s just so daft…

It takes great cleverness & dedication to your joke to make a successfully funny sculpture. This can be achieved with a touch of impudence, as in Michael Elmgreen & Ingar Dragset’s Marriage & Gay Marriage respectively. The arch side of our humour enjoys their capacity to play to our assumptions about every day life & how others might live. I find placing the two images together develops this concept more strongly.

My most beloved humorous visual artist is David Shrigley. He’s extremely prolific & disciplined, giving himself a certain number of drawings to do per day. The style is not the point. His work is often silly, downright puerile, panicky, scatological, rude, sweary & distinctive. Some of them leave me helpless with laughter.

There are many artists today working in a similar way & spirit, but the best of the others in my opinion is Nathaniel Russell, who combines text with photographs to subvert the familiar:

In David Shrigley’s vast body of work, you’ll find perhaps all the theories of what makes jokes funny. There is so much of it that for every few you don’t laugh at, you might find one that cracks you up. I could flood you further with my favourites, but after Rembrandt’s dog fouling behaviour, I’m keeping it clean.