VERSATILE ARTIST

Artists are finding inspiration in gags, slapstick, clowns, comics, and stand-up comedy. The results are sometimes satirical, sometimes ludicrous, and sometimes ‘so funny you could cry’.

Funny painting of Monalisa

First you laugh. Then you wonder why. This is the one-two punch of humor in art today, where laughter is nervous but never cheap, and comic turns are but the gateway to a world of doubt. Indeed, funny art comes so loaded with piercing ironies, sudden surrealities, and deadpan expressions of horror or grief that we cannot be sure if it is even okay to laugh. A lingering tendency among critics to dismiss artists who employ humor as mere jokers hasn’t prevented such artists from turning to satire with renewed vigor. Cartoon images now seem to be everywhere—in painting and sculpture as well as video and digital animation, tacked to walls or drawn directly on them. The funniest-looking figures, however, are less Popeye than R. Crumb’s bearded Mr. Natural, fraught with anxiety, swearing, sweating, and questioning every feeling and thought.


“This is why humor can be useful,” says Adam McEwen, a mordant, British-born New York artist, who has his first New York solo show opening next month at the Nicole Klagsbrun gallery. “It can destabilize a situation and, in a split second, draw the viewer in or allow something else out.”
What is that something else? Ask John Currin. “When I started making funny paintings,” he says, “they felt deeper and more about heavy things, like death and sex and love, that I always wanted my paintings to be about. The sillier they looked on the surface, the more they seemed to contain those feelings.”
He is not alone in this thinking. Consider Amy Cutler and her Tiger Mending, a demented 2003 gouache on paper. Evoking Rudyard Kipling’s Just So Stories, Cutler pictures three prim women sitting in tall grass, mending the hides of full-grown sleeping tigers. The women, all identical (surrogates for the artist), are so unruffled by the outlandish situation they might as well be at a quilting bee surrounded by kittens. It is a funny image, in a sardonic kind of way. It is also rather poignant.
British artist Sarah Lucas is another who approaches so-called women’s work, particularly in regard to sexual relations, with tongue firmly in cheek. Her 1990s erotic bunny sculptures—limp, seriously anorexic, stuffed nylon dolls, so exhausted they can hardly sit up in their straight-backed chairs—are as comic as they are pathetic. Ultimately, they discomfort more than they please.
Of course, that is the point. Art that makes you laugh does not really have to be funny—not just funny, that is. After all, a one-liner is simply that, a gag, an entertainment. For humor to exert any power in art, where meaning is layered and context is all, it must turn the ground on which it stands to jelly. As Lucas says, “If I make a female form out of a bucket and a couple of lightbulbs, that’s a very melancholy figure. It’s also kind of absurd.”
This witty-sad paradox has long legs in contemporary art. Take Dog Duet, a short 1975 video by William Wegman, featuring his weimaraners Fay Ray and Man Ray. With Wegman conducting off-camera, a tennis ball in hand, the dogs sit quietly, swinging only their expressive heads in a piece of canine choreography that is both cruelly funny and poetic.