Ha ha, who doesn’t like a joke? In the contemporary world a good sense of humour is a desirable character trait, and humourlessness a vice. Think about art though – the high art of tradition, and of modern and contemporary art galleries and museums – and the situation reverses. Most of the people who inhabit that world will say they appreciate a funny artwork (they don’t want to come across as puritans) – but behave quite differently. Look at the art they show, how it is presented, discussed and written about. That gives us the real picture. Humour in this context is usually presented as an afterthought, relegated to a sidebar or footnote. It is rarely regarded as the main event: as a key theme or strategy of the most significant art. This is attitude is reflected in culture more generally. To take one example, comedies, despite their popularity, do not get the best film Academy Award. Rather it is the ‘serious’ films (dramas, etc.) that usually win the Academy’s plaudits.
The thinking behind this artworld antipathy towards humour is often ingrained and almost instinctual. But one can discern its reasons. Let me lay these out as clearly as I can. This is, so to speak, the case against humour in art, and it comes in two parts:
1. In aesthetic terms, the pleasures of humour are of a low level. It ‘amuses’, it is mere ‘fun’, but it provides no experience of any value beyond that.
2. The pleasures of humour – amusement and fun – can only distract from more important matters. So, humour in art – precisely to the degree that it is amusing and fun – leaves things as they are, and supports the status quo in every sense – artistically, ideologically, socially, politically.
Some humour is well-described in these terms – most obviously the humour sold to us by mass culture. But not all art humour need be like this. What follows is a response to these charges, and a defence of certain kinds of humour in art.
There are jokes at the very origins of modern art. Art historians have tended to minimise these, not I think, out of priggishness, but because to focus on jokes in modern art plays into the hands of those who disparage it. Marcel Duchamp is the key example of a modern art joker. Duchamp’s work, most notably his readymades, inaugurate many key strands in modern and contemporary art. These are objects, presented with no or minimal changes, taken from everyday life and presented as artworks. All can be understood as jokes of some kind, and the most famous of these, Fountain (1917), a urinal laid on its back and exhibited on a plinth, also trades in a sexualised toilet humour. Vast amounts of ink have been spilled explicating Duchamp’s readymades. Their effect on art history, theory and philosophy is deeply serious. By their example, they show that there are no limits on what art can be: it can literally be anything, if an artist so decrees it. Yet, serious as these effects are, it is also clear that these works would not exist – they could not have been conceived and initially presented or understood – except as a kind of joke. The breaking of an artistic rule could not have happened without an impetus, and that impetus was found in a joke – the kind of pleasurable picking-away at convention, the wilful contrariness, or cocking a snook at authority that most of us will understand and have found pleasure and agency in at some point. Most of Duchamp’s mature works share this kind of joking character – the Mona Lisa with the moustache drawn on, the Sixteen Miles of String (1942) crisscrossing an exhibition of Surrealist art in New York, his strange self-portrait with his tongue, literally, in his cheek, and so on.
Another, lesser-known modern art joke is found at the origins of monochromatic abstraction – perhaps the most serious and sober branch of modern art. Bizarrely, an X-ray of Kasimir Malevich’s fêted Black Square (1915) has shown that its margins initially bore a title: Битва негров в темной пещере [commonly translated as Battle of Negros in a Dark Cave], a racist joke, which was later painted over.1 How this text got there is unknown, but assuming it was written by Malevich, it shows that a joke initially opened the way for many of the paths trod by artists in the twentieth and twenty-first centuries. These examples show that humour is not an add-on to modern and contemporary art; it is essential and foundational. To say something in jest at first allows us to bring it into the conversation, paving the way for us to say it seriously.
Let me shift from the art historical to the philosophical. There are two kinds of funny. There is funny ha-ha, and funny odd. My primary focus is the former. But the two are connected – in particular, both kinds of funny involve incongruity. All the things that prompt humour, the objects of humour or laughter, present some kind of incongruity. To experience humour, on this way of thinking, is to be overtaken by the realisation, a ‘sudden glory’ Hobbes (the philosopher, not the comic tiger named after him) called it, of an incongruity that breaks with our ordinary expectations. A man unexpectedly slips on a banana skin, an authority figure behaves like a child (or a child is presented as an authority figure), a tool is elegantly adapted to some unexpected new function, etc. While the perception of incongruity seems to be a key element in finding something humorous, it does not in itself suffice for it. Philosopher and film theorist Noël Carroll makes this clear, pointing out that incongruous things prompt other responses aside from humour. To take one range of alternative responses, they can disquiet us (perhaps the defining feature of the ‘funny-odd’), they can frighten or horrify us, they can disgust us. Each of these responses is prompted by perceiving the incongruity as a potential source of threat, danger or contagion. Strikingly, once this threat is removed, the threatening incongruity often appears transformed into an object of humour. Carroll observes that this is a key feature in the genre of horror-humour. Removed of the potential for threat, the incongruities embodied in monsters can become a source of laughter, and if the sense of threat is reinstated, humour tends to disappear, replaced by horror. Grotesquely, but tellingly, Carroll’s analysis draws on the reflections of Bill Cosby, then a comedian lionised as ‘America’s Dad’, but later unmasked as a serial rapist. Cosby, clearly, understood how untoward behaviour, when its malevolence is disguised beneath an innocuous, avuncular appearance, can appear comedic – an effect Jimmy Saville and Rolf Harris doubtless understood and exploited also.
So, the incongruities at the heart of humour can allow many other things in, good and bad. In art, it allows those shifts from funny ha-ha, to funny odd, and beyond – to many other kinds of thoughts and feelings. One way to look at this is to understand humorous incongruity as involving a transgressing of rules, whether relatively insignificant – in the case, say, of the linguistic play of puns, hyperbole, or self-deprecation – or more significant, as in the transgression of widely-respected social, cultural and political and moral norms. That’s to say that humour can function to get all kinds of things under the radar. Cosby and his ilk, sadly, provide one example of this. More happily, it allowed Duchamp to find ways to express then unutterable ideas that would give rise to revolutions in art. Humour can function in society in a similar way – and here too it is a double-edged sword. It can criticise the status quo, ridicule those who deserve it, and pose new ideas, all under the aegis of a laugh, or by employing more recondite strategies such as irony. Equally, it can also be a regressive, conservative force, using the same protections and strategies to ridicule difference, decry change, and abuse those seen as posing a threat. That’s also to say that humour is powerful, and must be used with responsibility and care. Those who say “it’s only a joke” to defend their bigoted or cruel humour abrogate this responsibility.
These points are enough to show that the second criticism of humour in art with which I began – that humour can only distract from more important matters – is unjustified. The pleasures that humour brings can function to make the sayable the unsayable, and the undoable doable. It is a licence to transgress, for good or ill. So, there is no doubt that it can play a powerful role in art and society.
Humour can have another kind of social role too, for it can act to crystallise and strengthen communities. If you share a laugh with someone, it often indicates a sharing of values. We readily bond over jokes about our shared circumstances and values – jokes at the expense of those who oppress us or norms that constrain us, for instance. In finding that we can laugh together about these things, we can initiate and strengthen a community conscious of its shared values, interests and circumstances. That is something that, again, can lead to positive changes of many kinds. Equally, we are all familiar with the experience of not getting the joke when others in a group do. A wall of faces laughing with each other, teeth bared, like pickets in a fence closing us out. That is the feeling of being excluded from a community. Sometimes we find our way into it after a time, and come to get the joke. Sometimes we realise these people are laughing at things we will never find funny, and never want to. We come to understand that their values and worldview allow them to enjoy transgressions that are bigoted, abusive or regressive.
Art jokes are rarely laugh-out-loud funny. Did even Duchamp’s most ardent admirers laugh out loud at his works when they were first shown? That’s a point made by British critic and painter Matthew Collings in his Channel 4 series This is Modern Art (1999), which devotes an entire episode to humour. A mediocre comedy film, by contrast, can produce gales of laughter in its audience. Is this a problem for funny art? I don’t think so. Undergoing a fit of uproarious laughter, like experiencing any emotion in an intense form, tends to be overwhelming and exciting, and sometimes that’s a very good thing. But it does not lend itself to either richness of experience or reflection. Those are things that the subtler humour of art is much better-suited to. It allows amusement to mix and interact with feelings such as surprise, distaste, disgust, and gives us the opportunity to reflect on the objects of laughter or amusement, and to reflect on the roots of our own responses. That also points the way to a response to the first criticism of humour in art that I laid out – that in the realm of aesthetics, the pleasures of humour are of a low level. Indeed, we may now add, art jokes do not even provide laugh-out-loud humour. But we can also now see that a weaker affect can accommodate more depth and richness of feeling, and can prompt us to reflect on our world, society and ourselves in significant and revealing ways. So, to those who would complain that art should aim at higher things than humour, we can answer that humour is capable of bringing out just as much depth and richness of feeling and thought as other, more familiar modes of the aesthetic, such as beauty or the sublime, those traditional focuses of the discipline of aesthetics in the eighteenth century.
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In writing of the works that are part of The Funny Show, I do my best to resist explaining their jokes, and I hope I give just enough information for the viewer to discover their humour themselves. That is a fine line to walk. Doubtless I will sometimes get it wrong, and for that I apologise in advance – as is frequently observed, explaining jokes ruins them.2
The gallery’s window display is filled with paintings by Andy Petrusevics. A screen, fixed to the window, shows Petrusevics himself huxterishly spruiking the paintings, in a format developed in his Instagram posts. The paintings and their presentation play with the commercially-oriented displays and styles of amateur painting of the kind one might find in a suburban café. The paintings themselves draw eclectically from popular modern sources – especially Picasso and Miro – giving them an ebullient, colourful and kitschy makeover, and imbuing them with manic, overcaffeinated energy. Yet beneath these appearances lies a sharp painterly intelligence. The stuff that culture has degraded, commercialised and turned into kitsch is transmuted back into art again. Shapes, colours and marks find new life, jostling agreeably with one another, while lines whip and arch across them like raised eyebrows and knowing smiles. In the main gallery space is a selection of paintings from Petrusevics’ series Indolent Monarchs. These satirical works are adapted from portraits of European monarchs from the Renaissance onwards (such as Rubens’ baroque portrait of Anna of Austria). Petrusevics’ gestural brushwork transforms them into absurd and ridiculous personae, simultaneously resuscitating them as virtuoso displays of colour, mark and gesture. A smaller canvas – a coda to the series – depicts Barron Trump, son of the US president, shown as a pasty-faced, apple-cheeked princeling. In the back gallery Petrusevics shows ‘e’ series of video works, which began in 1984 and is ongoing today. Here Petrusevics draws on his experience of video production at the ABC, making video content for informational and news formats. The ‘e’ videos present a frightening and prescient portrait of the methods of ‘e’, an imaginary dystopian, authoritarian power, that exploits the techniques of media to exercise political, corporate and ideological control. By turns these pieces are hilarious, frightening and galling – and they are uncannily disturbing in their prescient character. Petrusevics features in these videos with a large and starry cast of other performers, including artists Steve Wigg, Monica Corduff Gonzalez and the late, great Linda Lou Murphy.
Craige Andrae’s works, rather like Duchamp’s, can be understood as programmatically employing the strategies of the joke. Each has at its heart an incongruity that aims to prise an affect from its audience oscillating between humour and disquiet. As I have been writing, Andrae’s Lamby (2003) has been eyeing me, evilly baring its teeth from its position on TLM’s desk. Lamby is a wolf in sheep’s clothing – a taxidermied lamb adopting the aggressive posture of a wolf, its lips are pulled back to reveal needle-like dog teeth. It is a vivid, literal realisation of the figure of speech, an object both humorous – and, from my close vantage, deeply unsettling. Another work comprises a jumbo flatbed trolley wheel, complete with chunky pneumatic tyre, set atop a well-engineered frame. It is a play on another readymade, Duchamp’s bicycle wheel fixed to the top of a stool. It is said that in his studio Duchamp would idly spin it, meditating on the moving wheel. Here we are invited to imagine Andrae in his studio doing the same, but with a rather more utilitarian and powerfully-engineered Australian version. The Party (1999) is a group of helium balloons fitted with googly eyes. Their strings, which prevent them from floating up to the ceiling, are tied to beer cans. At the exhibition opening, and at selected other times, they will be freshly filled with helium, appearing as a party of engaged gallery-goers and participants at the opening and other gallery events. At other times they will sink to the floor and deflate, sozzled and exhausted. This work was created during Andrae’s studies at Goldsmiths College, London, on a Samstag Scholarship. It was part of a project that was calculated to disappoint, upset and troll the famous faculty then teaching there, and to critique that storied institution in the wake of its key role shaping the ‘Young British Artist’ scene of the 1980s and ’90s. Andrae’s other works here have a more relational character, and play on ideas of authorship. A new work comprises a laundry basket full of old socks. Stuffed, shown shut, and equipped, like the balloons, with googly eyes, these are turned into sock-puppet soft sculptures. Each is prominently ‘signed’ by Andrae with a label featuring his name, documenting and attesting his authorship, but also recalling the way a parent mark their children’s clothes hoping they make their way back from school camp. Andrae calls this work a “collectable”, inviting gallery visitors to freely take a sock. The collectables are an ongoing series, and another appears at the exhibition opening. Red wine, and on request other beverages, are served in wine glasses printed with a distinctive design that includes the artist’s name. The attendee may keep the glass if they wish. During the exhibition, a single glass, with a trace of red wine, will remain in the gallery, on a tiny shelf purpose-built by the artist. Andrae’s collectables play on the idea of a collectable or editioned work. They are the kind of object one would ordinarily not think worth taking, let alone ‘collecting’, yet the artist’s artful, generous and gently self-deprecating authorship transforms them into strangely – and genuinely – desirable objects.
Kate Mitchell’s video, I Am Not a Joke (2007) shows the artist cutting a circle in the floor (in fact a purpose-built raised stage) around where she stands. Eventually the floor gives way, and Mitchell falls through the hole she has sawn. It enacts a kind of slapstick joke familiar from old Looney-Tunes style cartoons. But in staging this joke in real life, its meaning and significance changes and enlarges in profound ways. It becomes an instance of another cultural form, task-based performance art, imbricating the real body and mind of the artist into a physically fraught and anxiety-inducing situation that brings to mind fraught existential themes.
Truc Truong’s Nestlé’s Affair (2025) will be familiar to those who have frequented her excellent artist cafe, Smoking Fish on Carrington Street, as until now, it has taken pride of place in the front window there. It comprises a mechanical toy horse – Shetland-pony–sized – its head removed and replaced with a latex goat mask. The head has added to it long, thin black hair which falls to the floor, obscuring the creature’s face, emo style. Curling horns poke out from the sides of the mop of hair, and the hybrid’s hooves rest atop four cans of Nestlé condensed milk. It is, clearly, an incongruous, hybrid animal, combined from parts of unrelated creatures, and human-like hair. It acts, one senses, as a scapegoat of some kind, an avatar bearing the suffering that is the wages of sin and unbidden, goaty desires. Key to this work are the cans of Nestlé condensed milk. These are close to ubiquitous in Vietnamese life – Vietnamese coffee is made with a lavish serve of the thick, creamy stuff. The story of how this came about is deeply troubling. In pre-1945 Vietnam (i.e., French Indochina) Tamil herders and milkmen sold fresh milk, but they were driven out by European corporations such as Nestlé. An advertisement of the time depicts pale Vietnamese people rejecting the fresh goat and cow milk sold by dark-skinned Tamil milkmen as smelling of “hairy goat”. Instead, the Vietnamese were encouraged to buy Nestlé’s milk products. One advertisement instructed its readers: “Sữa Nestlé là nhãn hiệu sữa tốt nhất thế giới. Chỉ có sữa Nestlé có thể nuôi trẻ lớn khôn thay cho sữa mẹ.” [Nestlé milk is the best milk brand in the world. Only Nestlé milk can nourish children and help them grow as a substitute for breast milk.Thus Vietnamese consumers were induced to buy cans of sweetened condensed milk and powdered milk as a sign of modernity, whiteness and health, in preference to fresh milk, and over time the Tamil milkmen were pushed out. Hence the black, glossy hair, and goat-like characteristics of Truong’s hybrid creature, which does indeed bear the racialised traits Nestlé brandished to such effect against Vietnam’s existing dairy industry. Humour here is a superficial carapace, a kind of defensive strategy, for beneath that, the creature is indeed a kind of scapegoat, bearing for us the load of these dark facts of colonialism. Truong’s As If It Were an Honour (2025) uses humour in a similar way, employing a playful object to reflect on dark truths. Here, two stuffed pink rubber gloves are joined by a long tube of fake Louis Vuitton branded fabric. It encourages thoughts of comedically-extended bendy arms stretching out for a hug, and when they are shown Truong encourages curators to deploy them in their own playful way. (My TLM Co-Director has done this here, incorporating into their installation the milk crate that Truong packed this piece in, one of the ‘hands’ reaching down to touch the crate). Here, it seems, there are references to service industries, and the invisible labour done by those who, now and then, might just team their rubber gloves with some (fake) Louis Vuitton.
As I come to the end of my essay, I see Jazmine Deng and Helium Liu installing their collaborative work for the exhibition. They will, apparently, not finish until Deng deems the results “hilarious”. The installation comprises an impromptu shrine to an imaginary artist, Artie Cockshot, and a tower of boxes, extending to the gallery’s ceiling, in which copies of an experimental 8000-word, 92-page zine devoted to the artist are packed. Deng and Liu scraped TLM’s website, downloading old logo materials so their zine would be a convincing counterfeit of a TLM exhibition catalogue. Zines somehow seem to emerge and spill from every available crevice in the boxes. Plans for the installation, and even more zines, emerge from the walls and air conditioning duct. I have not yet had time to read the zine cover to cover, but I have read enough to know that the tale of Artie Cockshot, which Deng and Liu tell at great length, is indeed wild – a fantastical, absurd and outrageous confabulation. In the process, the zine also gives a picture of a TLM and Adelaide art scene that might occupy a parallel universe – or might just satirise the actual version. Evidence of Deng and Liu’s imagined world seem to spill from every crack and crevice of the gallery, as if through a rift in reality. Scanning the zine again, I notice that all the names in the booklet (including my own) are misspelled. Or perhaps our names are simply spelled differently in this parallel universe. That leads me to wonder what “cockshot” means – perhaps it’s a term from badminton? I google it, and immediately regret it. Sigh.
– Michael Newall
- The racist joke was filched from an earlier artist who produced an album of such ‘humorous’ monochromes, Alphonse Allais.
↩︎ - As E. B. White says, “Explaining a joke is like dissecting a frog. You understand it better but the frog dies in the process.” This is a sad thing, and also, I think, rather mysterious. Generally, having art explained when we do not understand it increases our capacity take pleasure in it. But explaining a joke, no matter how elegantly, destroys its ability to give us the amusement that is its raison d’etre. I have not come across any convincing explanation of this striking phenomenon.
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