Comedy in Crises by Unknown

Author:Unknown
Language: eng
Format: epub
ISBN: 9783031189616
Publisher: Springer International Publishing

Humour and Art of Its ‘Time’: Context and Temporality

Jokes are subjective and ‘of their time’. What one might have found funny in the nineteenth century may now be considered outdated or rude; what one culture laughs at, another may not. For this reason, it is crucial when looking at visual art to consider how our personal and cultural backgrounds influence our ability to register, understand and appreciate strategies of humour in a work (Klein 2007, p. 11). Thus, humour, like all culture, is a form of discourse or social construction.

For centuries, laughter has been deemed immoral because of its capacity to incite a loss of control and as a form of asserting power (Morreall 1983, pp. 85–88). In philosophy, Charles Baudelaire (following Thomas Hobbes) considers laughter to be founded on the feeling of superiority of one over another or of one being ridiculed (Baudelaire 1956). Theodor Adorno (2001) was also critical of humour, considering culture an industry and laughter almost as mass-produced, therefore losing its agency. To consider Adorno’s point, one thinks, for example, of live audiences in the theatre, cinema or televised shows, where unified laughter is encouraged, ‘pushing pluralism into monism, obliterating individuality for the sake of eliminating fear’ (Coulson 2007, p. 147). In this instance, humour lacks the ability to protest. Shea Coulson analyses the potential of laughter in ‘art’—in the wider sense, not necessarily ‘fine art’ or just visual culture—to affect change using Adorno’s theories of laughter. For Coulson, ‘The comic in art must remain mute, for otherwise it would succumb to the culture industry's dominating laughter’ (2007, p. 150). In other words, the joke must remain somewhat outside of societal norms to retain its agency. Otherwise, art’s straddling of nature and commodity falls prey to the ‘industry’ (Coulson 2007, p. 149). In this regard, it is pertinent to remember that the artworld is a capitalist infrastructure, and art is often a commodity. Humour provides a way of challenging this infrastructure, while remaining inside it. Which is to say, artists employing humour remain, in some ways, outsiders, yet accepted by the mainstream; taking the role of court jesters employed by the powerful and thus allowed to make fun of them.

Expounding on the role of the academic and the clown, Shea Coulson observes that both are ‘excluded from instrumental regulation and as such pose an affront to reification by either anarchistically refusing to join society (the clown) or purposefully remaining apart from it (the eccentric)’ (Coulson 2007, p. 147). This role is clear in the practices of Marcel Duchamp and Man Ray, Cahun and Moore, Bob and Roberta Smith, the Guerrilla Girls and Chetwynd, who each use strategies of humour to evoke a fluid identity that is difficult to pin down, making it harder to be subject to ‘instrumental regulation’. Duchamp poked fun at the artworld with his gender-bending pseudonyms; the Guerrilla Girls critique artworld infrastructures from within with their satirical posters and their gorilla masks might also be understood as a form of clowning; Bob and

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