from ARTnews, September 2004
By Linda Yablonsky

What's So Funny About Contemporary Art?
Artists are finding inspiration in gag, slapstick, clowns, comics, and
stand-up comedy. The results are sometimes satirical, sometimes ludicrous,
and sometimes 'so funny you could cry.'

First you laugh. Then you wonder why. This is the one-two punch 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 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.

...

For Chris Doyle, a Brooklyn artist who channels complex emotions through deadpan humor, laughter is often the best revenge. He has cast hot dogs, red bricks, and lawn chairs as human surrogates in videos that constantly mix storytelling with abstraction. In The Way Our Story Unfolds, a 2003 video animation, two lawn chairs and hose plays out an achingly funny seduction scene in a study of aging and the nature of love that is both tender and brutal. "I use dumb materials like hot dogs and lawn chairs because I believe there is pathos in those things," Doyle says. "If you can't find tremendous humor in everyday," he adds, "the sadness becomes overwhelming."

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