HUMOR HAS LONG had a role in art, though it seems to have emerged with abandon with the age of modern, contemporary art, and postmodern art. Two of the most influential modern artists, Pablo Picasso and Marcel Duchamp, though contemporaries, illustrate two different uses of humor.
For Picasso, humor was about juxtaposing surprising things, with the joke being on the art itself. His early collage-like paintings had puns and jokes, and later, he could also evoke a chuckle with his fractured cubist portraits of beautiful female models.
In contrast, Duchamp was a master of “blague,” the French term for humor with a cynical edge, in which the joke is on viewers. Of his many famous pranks, his mustache on a Mona Lisa image is best known. Much of his art derided the conceits of the art world and its mavens; it has been described as “condescending prank.”
With the emergence of contemporary and postmodern art in the 1960s, a new phase of humor was afoot, relying on “conceptual” approaches, text, and performance. In the mix, artists began to make jokes on each other.
And we see the Picasso-Duchamp dichotomy continue.
In the Picasso-like mold, we can look at a 2003 painting by the American artist Red Grooms, a comic of sort. The painting, “Manet at the Met,” is funny for its ability to caricature every kind of city person who jams into art museums. This is not laugh-out-loud humor. But the pleasure is augmented by Grooms’ painting and rendering skills.
By contrast, heirs to Duchamp love the prank, or pranking each other. In 1967, the conceptual artist Bruce Nauman made a neon spiral in blue and pink that said, tongue in cheek, “The True Artist Helps the World by Revealing Mystic Truths.” Nauman made lots of money selling his works. So to riff off of that fact, in 2008 an artist named Bert Rodriquez made a prank spiral of neon in blues and pink. It said, “The True Artist Makes Useless Shit for Rich People to Buy.”
This mix of humor and cynicism was well underway in contemporary art by then. Again, this highlighted the difference between humor by discontinuity or surprise, and humor that was meant to denigrate, often with sarcasm, some sacred cow in society or the art world. As Artnews once observed, the past century of “art” has “been rich in jokes, hoaxes, forged identities, subversive graffiti, and mass and solo performances with an aim to shock or annoy.” Duchamp’s shadow, of course.
Still, humor in art has been probed with sincere interest. Humorists from Mark Twain to Woody Allen have warned about dissecting humor, but it’s been done nevertheless. The still dominant “incongruity” theory was well put by the French essayist Pascal long ago: “Nothing produces laughter more than a disproportion between that which one expects, and that which one sees.”
According a curator at the Metropolitan Museum of Art (Met), in a catalog titled “Infinite Jest,” the best documented form of visual humor is the satirical drawing. Newspaper cartoonists still do this, a tradition that goes back to such greats as Leonardo da Vinci and Francisco Goya. Satire usually relies on caricature or exaggeration, or by turning people into animals or objects. Think Picasso here.
Everyone realizes that most humor is not strictly visual (in a fine art sense). When it is visual, it’s usually in the form of comics or sitcom “sight gags” (something we see that evokes immediate laughter).
All rapid surprises are not pleasant, of course, but humor fills this benign role (with punch lines, timing, etc.) Two other humor theories are common: Humor offers “relief” (a Freudian anti-repression idea) and, second, it allows us to feel superior, since much humor is about laughing down at the absurdity and misfortune of others. This is the nature of the aforementioned blague.
Postmodern artistic humor has increasingly used literary forums, or events and technologies. “Postmodern artists may not produce any objects at all,” says Sheri Klein in her book Art and Laugher. Postmodern art humorists often look like entertainers, a long tradition in cabaret or theater. Klein argues that there are four ways, or reasons, humor is used: for group solidarity, reduction of malice, pleasure, and criticism of norms.
The last two characterize postmodern art, Klein suggests. Postmodern humor seems to be a revival of “blague,” and postmodernists definitely know about Marcel Duchamp—indeed, he is a kind of patron saint for this approach. Today, one art theorist makes a living advocating for “prank theory.”
It would be wrong to say humor is a recent phenomenon, of course. According to art historian Simon Anderson, it is hidden across art history, even in great works. We just don’t know the times, clues, and incongruities—indeed punch lines—that might have existed, say, in the Sistine Chapel in its day. “I think there are jokes going on throughout the history of painting,” Anderson argues.
Or as the Met catalog says, uncovering that context for humor in past art is a challenge. They found “humorous” prints, but could not find an obvious punch line: “We have to dig through the historical record to reconstruct not only the event to which a print refers but also to figure out what people thought about it at the time.”
Trying too hard to be funny can backfire. A good deal of contemporary joke-art is hard to “get,” seems forced, or is simply too bitter to be funny. Still, no medicine has a better vehicle than humor. As one design artist has noted, amid the constant parade of art and design books and annuals seen today, the “most memorable” pieces tend to provide humor and information all at once.