In this article, I explore two projects concerning artistic deployments of humour, starting with With

Humorous Intent symposium at Mostyn, North Wales, April 2012 and moving ontoThree Artists
Walk into A Bar.. Amsterdam, April 2012.
I begin with a note on the recent David Shrigley exhibition Brain Activity held at the Hayward
gallery in London by Mike Chavez-Dawson;
David Shrigleys exhibition Brain Activity at the Hayward Gallery earlier this year presented the
first-ever extensive survey of his dynamic and prolific oeuvre; drawings, animations, sculptures and
installations that ebbed between traditional presentation and the interventional. These playfully
opened up further levels of engagement for those who might be familiar with Davids work and
mesmerized those who werent in equal measure especially with works such as: a neon sign with the
words its Freezing In Here housed in a glass space outside the Royal Festival Hall entrance (first
observed by me on one of the coldest nights in history) accompanying music (Monkey & I Live In
Your House - available as a 7inch vinyl record with the exhibition catalogue) in the lift to the first floor
for the exhibition, a nailed rich tea biscuit above the lift, the taxidermy rat under one of the galleries
skirting, a miniature stick figure out on the sculpture balcony beckoning you to join them, and the
mini cut away in one of the gallery walls for you to crawl through (and we did - in actual fact
someone got temporarily stuck, note to self always take rucksack off when crawling through a small
hole) to mention but a few.
Davids works have this innate knack of delicately splicing the obvious with the absurd and balancing
it with just the right amount of sentiment in its articulation, which highlights that humor is always
tittering on some kind of liminality, and it is with this sensitivity thatBrain Activity was curated, of
course, enhanced with Shrigleys Midas touch.
Unfortunately I could not share Mikes above experience of Shrigleys exhibition due to a taxidermyphobia.
Many contemporary exhibitions focus with grim earnestness on the difficulties of social justice,
environmental degradation or economic inequity. Adding humor to the equation dismantles the sense
of insistent authority and reminds us that we are all complicit in these inequities. Humour can offer
an astute as well as cathartic and even magical way to deal with big issues (Coblentz, 2009).
Embracing humours capacity to stimulate personal and social debate through artistic interventions
in the same spirit as the above words of Assistant Curator Cassandra Coblentz writing in the
exhibition catalogue of Seriously Funny held at Scottsdale Museum of Contemporary Art, USA, in
2009, With Humorous Intent was a symposium I organised, held in cooperation with Mostyn and
Loughborough University School of the Arts, in conjunction with Politicized Practice Research Group,
held over two days which interrogated current artistic deployments of the comic and the humorous to
coincide with Ha Ha Road, an exhibition at Mostyn exploring the use of humour in contemporary art
with artists including Bobby Baker, Yara El Sherbini, Ceal Floyer and Bedwyr Williams.
The impetus for With Humourous Intent was to allow me to interrogate my current research
interests concerning laughter, document and audience through the conceptual and practical

framework of contemporary Performance Art and provide a discursive public platform for Ha Ha
Road.
Inspired by Gaston Bachelard's ideas in Poetics of Space (1958), about how various environments
affect our moods, feelings and behaviour, the absurd out of place-ness of artworks I have installed
as an artist and curator in locations as diverse as a kitchen in a suburban house, a pub, a lecture
hall in a library, an empty warehouse, a market, a redundant language school to a previous Mexican
Foreign Embassy and Foreign Press Association, often generate humorous responses which relates
to John Morrealls ideas around incongruity and Alfred Koestlers 1960s concept of bisociation. In
environments such as the white cube art gallery which traditionally have demanded a somewhat
formal and quiet contemplation of the artworks on show. Using laughter as a device to counter
ssshhh...be quiet-ness, my interest of using laughter within audience participatory encounters
resides in Sherri Kleins words in a chapter entitled The Public Spectacle : Performance Art and
Laughter in her 2006 book Art and Laughter ;
Performance Art has tremendous potential as an art medium for the expression of humour because
it relies on experimentation, improvisation and serendipity, all of which can result in the unexpected
and the humourously incongruous (2006:121).
Despite several notable group exhibitions such as Laughing in a foreign language held at the
Hayward Gallery in London in 2008 which displayed an array of international artists include John
Bock, Doug Fishbone, Marcus Coates, Candice Breitz, Jake and Dinos Chapman and Kutlug
Ataman, Ralph Rugoff and endeavoured to highlight the incongruous nature of humour getting lost in
translation and cross-cultural misunderstanding whilst acting to deflate and punctuate ones selfimportance (Katoaoka 2008:6), there appears to be a relative dearth in both publication and public
discussion by way of notable symposia etc. on the humour/art debate. The previous, albeit moderate
research into this subject currently available in the public realm, nevertheless suggests that interest
is fertile and has the potential to be explored in far greater depth. My current PhD studies and past
initiated projects have attempted to remedy this. In 2005, I curated All For Show, a presentation of
short films described as slapstick theatrics, awkward and macabre sense of humour and
cringingly funny (Lack, 2005:14) shown in various contemporary art spaces in New Zealand,
Germany, The Netherlands and the USA. Films by artists such as Harold Offeh, Beagles and
Ramsay and Doug Fishbone tested the acceptable limits of humour in the white cube gallery space.
ID magazine critic Jessica Lack (2005:14) wrote these idiosyncratic films succeed in finding surreal
quirks in the banalities of everyday life. Jennifer Higgies The Artists Joke (2007) is one such
critique of the subject which dispels any notion that serious attention is not already being paid to
deployments of humour as a strategy within arts practices. Whereas Sherri Kleins 2006 offering is
almost elementary in its sophistication towards addressing the fundamental philosophical issues of
this subject, Higgie offers an abundance of essays by contemporary and historical theorists as well
as practitioners addressing the key concepts of such a study. To any criticism that humour can be
bracketed into various boxes, in one fell swoop, Higgie states; ..if humour has one characteristic, it
is to thumb its nose at pigeonholes (2007:12), placing humour in an exciting liminal state of the
place where it may choose to inhabit. Discussing the artist as a disruptive force against the

seriousness and pomposity of the art world, in Art Relations and the Presence of Absence, Third
Text (2009), Dean Kenning states; The image of art is ridiculed through the clich of excess and
through a humour that denatures arts supposed seriousness (2009:443) when talking about the
work of Paul McCarthy.
In developing With Humorous Intent, I posed myself a question to reflect upon;
Is it possible to assess the application of humour as a set of methodological strategies
within a range of contemporary art practices and if so how are these strategies
deployed and their results judged?
To answer this question, I aimed to set up an international platform for academics and practitioners
to interrogate how humour may function within contemporary art practice, potentially the first of its
kind to be held in the U.K. To achieve this, my objectives consisted of bringing together artists,
curators, theorists and academic researchers composed of invited guest speakers; Gillian Whiteley
(aka bricolagekitchen), Gary Stevens and Frog Morris who were joined by Andrew Paul Wood
(University of Canterbury, Christchurch, New Zealand); Dave Ball, curator of Ha Ha Road,Mostyn
and QUAD, Derby; Jonathan Roberts; Alison OConnor (Oxford University); Shaun Belcher
(Nottingham Trent University School of Art and Design); Eve Smith (Liverpool John Moores
University); Jennifer Jarman; Hannah Ballou (Central School of Speech and Drama, University of
London); Steve Fossey (University of Northampton); Simon Bell (Anglia Ruskin
University,Cambridge); Waldemar Pranckiewicz; and Dean Kelland (Central Saint Martins, University
of the Arts, London). The symposium was video recorded by James Alex Newman and Frog Morris.
Presenters were invited to interrogate four areas of enquiry:
1.

humour as an artistic methodology deployed both historically and in

contemporary practice embracing fine art forms including painting and sculpture
as well as performance-based art practices.

2.

traditional and contemporary perceptions of humour against the serious

backdrop of the art-world institution where humourous artistic endeavours
seeking to poke fun at the art world if as Barbara Pollack has stated, humour is
one of the most effective means of puncturing pomposity (Barbara Pollack:

2004).
3.
humourous devices within artistic practice to shed light on John Morrealls
theories of humour as connected to superiority, relief and incongruity (John
Morreall:1983)
4.

humour as an artistic, disruptive, and transgressive act, a form of personal

and social catharsis to
destabilise social norms of correctness.

Kicking off the presentations, Dave Ball gave a paper entitled How to Curate an Exhibition that
Doesn't Make Sense where he considered humour as a passage from the realm of normality or
sense into the realm of abnormality or non-sense via artworks. In the next presentation, Silly, sick,

slick: the fall and rise of comedic art, Gillian Whiteley considered humour as a strategy within
contemporary art, creating a counter-world in relation to Michel de Certeaus The Practices of
Everyday Life. From her own experience of socialising in working mens clubs, with their
particularly offensive, often sexist and racist forms of humour, she spoke about humour as a working
class resistance and its capacity to puncture and prick and disrupt the status quo in what she
referred to as ludic disruption. This group of presentations was concluded by Gary Stevens who
suggested that the transgressive and subversive quality of humour often makes visual arts people
uncomfortable. This was followed by a question and answer session between speakers and
audience members which was met with lively debate. This format was repeated over the course of
the two day symposium.
Amongst the other presenters, Frog Morris searched for the elusive point where comedy ends and
art begins, highlighting a series of solo and curatorial artistic projects combining elements of
comedy, music and art whilst Jonny Roberts gave an introduction into how he explores guilty
pleasure, formal parameters and hidden dialogues, in order to subvert the absurdity of a perceived
hierarchy. Alison OConnor interrogated what she referred to as the redemptive capacity of stand-up
comedy whilst Jennifer Jarmans performative lecture drew parallels between the artist and
ventriloquist and Hannah Ballou shared her research into the naked female comic body in
performance praxis. Steve Fossey questioned what is funny about piss as Simon Bells presentation
asked whether Laibach and the Neue Slowenische Kunst are often misinterpreted as a comic
turn and Shaun Belcher presented a comic dog. Presentations concluded with Dean Kellands
research on Steptoe and Son. Both Waldermar Pranckiewiczs analysis of Douglas Hueblers
photographs and written statements and my exploration of slapstick comedy and mechanical
reproduction encouraged the audience to engage in a participatory activity which had humorous
results.
Answering my question, the presentations illustrated a diverse set of strategies towards the
contemporary and historical use of humour within a range of artistic practices. I had set up an
effective discursive platform where an eclectic range of viewpoints was shared. The symposium
became a convivial encounter where social badinage acted as a coping mechanism for some of the
presenters who stayed in Llandudnos version of Fawlty Towers. Such stories supplied much of the
narrative for banter throughout the symposium and made for witty conversation during evening
drinks in the Palladiium-turned-Wetherspoons.
A month after the symposium, I was invited to present findings ofWith Humorous Intent and
elements of my PhD research as part of a humour/art-based project initiated at De Appel in
Amsterdam which staged a number of lectures and workshops by internationally renowned
practitioners from the field of art, theory and comedy including humour theorist Simon Critchley.
Three Artists Walk into a Bar... aimed to, as its manifesto read;
use(ing) the quality of humour to test the potential of art as a critical instrument for the analysis of
social, political and cultural issues, this project aimed to build a community of peers, professionals
and a variety of publics. The commitment to humour, stemmed from a belief in its social quality; in its
capacity to bring subversive voices and unexpected perspectives to mainstream awareness

I was lucky enough to present alongside Giselinde Kuipers, Associate Professor of Cultural
Sociology at the University of Amsterdam and Editor-in-chief of Humor International journal of
humor research. Giselinde, asked the audience to consider how transgressive humour works in
practice and focused on how humour may be understood as a way of exploring social relations.
Issues raised in both our presentations were later discussed in an informal workshop I gave around
bodily slapstick and humour as being in-convivial. Where it was fascinating for me to get feedback
on my artistic deployment of humour from Giselinde, a social scientist, who I must thank for
encouraging me to explore laughter through the lens of a sociolinguist, discussions about the
deployment of comedy and slapstick in the classroom became the subject of a lively conversation
between myself and workshop participant/Three Artists.. artist Robert Wittendorp as both of us
drew on our teaching experiences of how we believe humour may operate in the classroom.
To combat prejudices that humour is simplistic, non-academic or non-serious, as Mike ChavezDawson refers to above, humour, I believe in its liminality, can provide a method to open up serious
debate of a range of issues, having the capacity of revealing itself in the most unlikeliest of places.
Humour can act as communicative interlocutor between artists, social scientists, teachers and
guests of a Basil Fawlty alike.
On near completion of this article, I received an apt SMS message from Mr Chavez-Dawson:
"I inherited a painting and a violin which turned out to be a Rembrandt and a
Stradivarius. Unfortunately, Rembrandt made lousy violins and Stradivarius was a
terrible painter."
Tommy Cooper.
Ha.
Lee Campbell, Artist, PhD by Practice Student at Loughborough University School of the
Arts will be presenting his School of Laughter at this years SUPERNORMAL Festival at
Braziers Park in Oxfordshire for further
detailshttp://www.supernormalfestival.co.uk/arts/biaw-alumni/.He will also be
participating in Michael Portnoys Experimental Comedy Training Camp at the Banff
Centre, Alberta, Canada, September-November 2012.
Further information on my participation at the De Appel Three Artists Walk Into a Bar
project can be found at
http://www.threeartistswalkintoabar.com/saturdays/
Mike Chavez-Dawson, Artist, PhD by Practice Student at MIRIAD, is currently working
with David Shrigley on his forthcoming show HOW ARE YOU FEELING? at Cornerhouse
which opens on the 6th October, 2012 for further
info: http://www.cornerhouse.org/art/art-exhibitions/david-shrigley-how-are-you-feeling

References.
COBLENTZ, C., 2009. Seriously Funny [Publication of an exhibition held at Scottsdale Museum of
Contemporary Art 2009] Ed. Ann Neff R. A 2009 SMoCA
HIGGIE., J., 2007. The Artists Joke. The MIT Press.
LACK, J., Funny Peculiar I-D Magazine London. July 2005
KENNING, D., In Art Relations and the Presence of Absence, Third Text 23: 44 435-446 (2009)
KLEIN, S., 2006. Art and laughter. London I. B. Tauris.
KATAOKA., M., 2008. Laughing in a foreign language. London : Hayward Publishing
MORREALL, J., 1983.Taking Laughter Seriously. State University of New York Press, Albany
POLLACK, B., The Elephant in the Room in ARTNews. September 2004. p118-9
1 However, I am unconvinced that all performance art practices necessarily rely on such factors as improvisation and serendipity. It is
indeed how the performance protagonist wishes to control both the performance and his respective audience that dictates the importance of
improvisatory elements and the possibility for serendipitous moments to occur during the performance.

2 I would like to remark that despite an artists disruptive potential against the art world, there appears to be a case of the hand that feeds
the mouth. On the one hand, the artist wants to expose the art world but then also needs it to validate his/her actions, i.e to give the action
symbolic importance.

Lee Campbell

Art & Humour

JUNE 26, 2012by Nathaniel Mellors

Reeves & Mortimers Masterchef sketch

Andr Breton introduced the term Black Humour in 1940 and, ever since, the artists
joke has been partly mired in the realm of the unfunny the conventional view would be
that art is more concerned with semiotics, semantics, small shifts in perception or just
plain weird effect than big-belly laughs. Art historian John C. Welchman has drawn on a
1960 interview with Marcel Duchamp to elaborate on Bretons concept. According to
Duchamp, Theres a humour that is black which doesnt aspire to laughter and doesnt
please at all. It is a thing in itself, a new feeling so to speak, which follows from all sorts
of things that we cant analyze with words.
Which sounds great and articulates one of the finest characteristics of art: it can be
anything it has this potential for new forms, new feelings. As an artist working with
humour, and as a fan of both art and comedy, Ive noticed that some of my favourite
comedic artists work has plotted a darkening trajectory as it has evolved into
something more artful (the third series of The League of Gentleman; Reeves &
Mortimers Bang Bang Its and Catterick; Lenny Bruces whole career) less funny,
less popular but richer and stronger in other ways, the work takes on a more
autonomous form.
So at what point does comedy become art and what happens when art takes on
comedy? Is laughter necessarily lost along the way? Is humour really something beyond
language, as Duchamp suggests? Is there an intersection of function for these
divergent forms and, if so, then how serious is it? And if Breton can coin Black Humour
then can I suggest some other colours? This week, as part of the Hayward Gallerys
Wide Open School Programme Im giving a talk titled Art & Humour What Could Be &

What Is in which I plan to elaborate on a particularly brown chromatic. By way of

introduction, here are some sketches (funny) linked to popular tropes of contemporary
art (not funny):
1. Semiotics: Jimmy James
This routine is a series of linguistic projections and inferences from a blank MacGuffin
what could be inside the box? Anything could and what we get is a joyful reticulation
of surrealism and association, semantics and pragmatics. In contrast with a lot of
contemporary comedy (and art), which can be quite reductive, theres no
underestimation of the audiences intelligence here. Theres also no obvious social
target unless you consider idiocy to be a social group, rather than a general human
characteristic. This routine demonstrates the enormous range of three people in a
chance encounter, and in doing so emphasizes our basic interdependency it feels
generous, celebratory and necessary.
2. Mediation: The Kids in the Hall
My sister, Holly, got really hooked on The Kids in The Hall, a Canadian comedy group,
and was busy programming the video recorder when it was shown on late night UK TV in
the early 1990s. Now, thinking back, it seems VERY clear to me that this Is it my
cabbage head? sketch is about the difficulty of gender relations in a world beset by
political correctness and that these pretend-French fur-trappers are rowing their way
through a skit addressing the confluence of post-imperialism and capitalism While this
routine is evidently about language as a subjectively constructed, mediating technology.
Marshall McLuhan had that theory all stitched up, but still got subpoenaed for his
crimes by a comic.
3.a. Performance Art & Horror: Reeves & Mortimers Masterchef v.1
When I first saw this sketch it slightly frightened me at the same time as making me
laugh. Its great that in comedy we can accept combinations of clashing forms and ideas
that might otherwise be dismissed as pretentious. Contemporary art is popularly
perceived as quite humourless and its interesting in that respect that so many British
musicians and comics went through the art-college experience: Richard Hamilton taught
Bryan Ferry, Vic Reeves studied painting, Adam Ants fashion and graphic design skills
found their apotheosis in his holistic inception(s) of the Antz, and John Lennon talked
about how rather than simply being a musician the art-school education helped the
Beatles conceive of the band as a broader tool.
Maybe this touches on something which is peculiar to Britain as much as the history of
the art college. At their best, these environments have enabled a kind of transferable
cultural nous in a class-crossing setting which can be explosively productive.
3.b. Cultural Cannibalism: Reeves & Mortimers Masterchef v.2
More recently, Reeves and Mortimer have returned to their Masterchef-parody format
and used it to harpoon a mutant Peter Kaye (played by Vic Reeves).

I feel bad for Peter Kaye here because we have been in the grip of an economy of
nostalgia for some time, and in that respect he seems like such a nominal target. There
are swathes of other artists, musicians, novelists and comics doing what Kaye is nailed
for turning the familiar into an emotive quick-fix; pointing out already interesting
things. This de-historicizing economy is amplified through the web and digital
communications media. Its as if we are flirting with a permanent cultural present, an
amnesiac reality which we are all perpetuating this blog-with-YouTube format is
perfectly attuned to it. Familiarity can be patronising, reassuring to the intellect,
inherently conservative and excellently profitable we always get it. In Bob Mortimers
words, Kaye is serving up things people had previously known but had forgotten they
were aware of. In Masterchef, Vic and Bob have picked the perfect show to address
this cannibal condition because it goes to the heart of consumerism. What do we want
to eat?

About the author

Nathaniel Mellors is an artist and musician. He is a co-founder of Junior Aspirin Records, a

Senior Lecturer in Contemporary Art Practice at Leeds Metropolitan University, UK, and an
advisor at the Rijksakademie van beeldende kunsten, Amsterdam, the Netherlands. He lives
and works in Amsterdam and London. He is currently exhibiting 'Ourhouse Episode 3 feat.
BAD COPY' at Salle de Bains, Lyon, France. Forthcoming solo exhibitions include Malm
Konsthall / C-salen, Sweden and MONITOR, Rome, Italy, in November 2012.

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