Sense of Humor: Caricature, Satire, and the Comical From Leonardo to the Present
National Gallery of Art, Washington, D.C., through Jan. 6 Stop me if you’ve heard this one, said Susan Delson in The Wall Street Journal. Three curators walked into a museum—and pulled from its vast collection some 100 prints, drawings, and illustrations they considered to be good for a laugh. The results have been hanging at the National Gallery of Art all summer, and “witty as they are, the pieces on view are also fine works of art.” One of the oldest artifacts is a 16th-century drawing, Two Grotesque Heads, that anticipates a coming flood of caricature and was created by a student of Leonardo da Vinci. The show’s last gallery mixes newspaper funny pages, underground comics, and various works by such modern masters as Roy Lichtenstein, Andy Warhol, and Alexander Calder. But is enough of the work truly funny? asked Sheila Wickouski in the Fredericksburg, Md., Free LanceStar. “Some might find the exhibit amusing and others irritating.”
In the works from previous centuries, “it is a revelation to discover so much bawdy, rambunctious, even asinine humor,” said Kriston Capps in Washington City Paper. In one 1592 etching, Cupid gives “the equivalent of the finger” to a bearded satyr who’s leering at a naked, sleeping Venus. In Jean-Honoré Fragonard’s The Armoire, two lovers have been caught in flagrante inside a wardrobe, and the gag is in the way the young man sheepishly covers his crotch with a hat. “More sophisticated humor” finally arrives courtesy of England’s William Hogarth (1697–1764) and France’s Honoré Daumier (1808–1879), and the 20th-century gallery is better still, because the jokes still resonate. No explanations are required for the humor in Rupert Garcia’s 1969 silk screen that juxtaposes the grinning black chef from Cream of Wheat boxes with the caption “No More O’ This S---.”
“Most of the show isn’t funny at all,” and it’s worth asking why, said Philip Kennicott in The Washington Post. I suspect that’s because humor is too often cruel. In many of the older works, we’re prompted to laugh at people for the way they look, or because they’re hunchbacked, or because they drink too much. Racist and misogynist jokes spring from the same ugly impulse, and “as we advance as a society,” expanding our capacity to embrace as family the once marginalized, the old jokes become unfunny. But don’t worry that liberalism might kill comedy. In a 1799 etching by Francisco de Goya, a donkey dressed in fine clothes sits in a chair flashing “a smug, selfsatisfied smile” as he peruses a book filled with family portraits. Goya’s caption: “And so was his grandfather.” For the first time, “I laughed out loud,” and it was because the target of the joke was the willful stupidity of this preening ass. For as long as we human beings exhibit such avoidable, unnecessary flaws, “we can laugh at ourselves, and productively.”