'Snot Funny! Humor and Art

It is difficult to think of humor and intellect as going hand-in-hand: just like the divisions of mind and body, humor is considered base, and mutually exclusive to higher cognition. After all, humor is very corporeal: laughter is the physical response to something funny. If you have any doubts of this, just consider these questions: did Jesus laugh? Can you imagine Muhammad telling a joke? Or Buddha, mid-meditation, passing gas and giggling?

This very issue has repercussions in art as well. The function of art has, for several centuries now, been expected to fulfill some philosophical purpose. Art is supposed to make us think. This especially overwhelmed art in the wake of the Conceptual Art movement, as artistic skill was thrown out the window, and the "idea" reigned supreme. It is thus that we separate the high arts from the low arts: art that is "funny" is not respectable. (It is thus that art historians also have a reputation for being a buttoned-up, humorless bunch. Ask yourself the Buddha question in regards to your Art History 101 lecturer. See what I mean?) If the separation of high art and low art did not exist, art would be indistinguishable from pure "entertainment:" a peanuts comic strip would be as aesthetically valuable as a Bruce Nauman; Will Ferrell would be more of a mover-and-shaker than Sol LeWitt; Andy Samberg's crude SNL digital shorts would be as artistically legitimate as a Jean-Luc Godard film. I myself try to fight the elitist reputation of art historians, but all I have to say is: yikes.

And yet, there is no denying that more people today are familiar with "D*** in a Box" than they are with "Les plus belles escroqueries du monde." The truth is the general population gets more out of Judd Apatow bromance than a minimalist sculpture. Isn't there something to be said for that? What is the ultimate value of the "I don't get it" aesthetic?

I have only seen a few previous exhibitions to address art and humor, and they were pretty much limited to political caricatures and comics. This is all well and good, but the inferiority of the funny is implied in the medium: print media of mass culture is again widely considered a "low" art, in constant struggle for legitimacy. The very fact that art historians only study humor in those media highlights their hesitation to mix "low" humor with high art. It's time art historians stopped taking ourselves so seriously. We need to make some allowances for entertainment in art, and welcome funny business with a chuckle.

I did recently came across one exhibition that more willingly explores humor in "high" art, and the title says it all: Cut My Legs Off and Call Me Shorty! Sadly, the exhibition is in Sweden, and the curators limited themselves to a small handful of Swedish artists. But at least they include a little wider range of media: photography, illustration, video and finally, painting!  It is a show long overdue in the art world, and I hope not the first of its kind--we can use a little humor on this side of the puddle. The creators have taken a quote by American writer E.B. White as "good advice" for the show: “Analyzing humor is like dissecting a frog. Few people are interested and the frog dies of it.”

Ok, I'll zip it.