Five works of art to make you laugh
Marcel Duchamp, L.H.O.O.Q. (1919) This seemingly slight, wry gesture by the French conceptualist Marcel Duchamp – defacing a cheap postcard reproduction of the Mona Lisa, by pencilling in a moustache and goatee – continues to influence artists today: while its defiantly silly, antiauthoritarian, school boy sniggering posture has been commonplace in art for decades, Duchamp’s interest in cross-dressing feels peculiarly of our moment.
Peter Fischli and David Weiss, The Way Things Go (1987) Hailed as a “postmodern classic”, and ripped off by the advertising industry, this 30-minute, 16mm video deserves its reputation as the Swiss artist duo’s masterpiece. Set in an empty warehouse, it documents a “chain reaction”, as ingeniously arranged, everyday objects appear to interact without human intervention: a rubber tyre rolls over see-sawing planks, before knocking over a stepladder, which sets off a candle attached to a roller skate, and so on. The comedy is pure slapstick: the objects are like silent actors, forever slipping up and falling over, condemned to perform absurdly futile tasks.
Sarah Lucas, Au Naturel (1994)
A cucumber and two oranges form a comically absurd phallus on one side of a raggedy old mattress half-slumped like a pale, podgy torso against a wall. Alongside, a couple of melons and a red fire bucket evoke a female nude. Au
Naturel is a classic example of Lucas’s nudge-and-wink sculptures, which are suffused with a raucous, often savage wit, and slyly interrogate the misogynistic “lad” culture of the Nineties.
Maurizio Cattelan, La Nona Ora (1999)
No survey of humour in art would be complete without the provocative Italian artist Maurizio Cattelan, who is routinely described as the “prankster” of the art world. La
Nona Ora (The Ninth Hour) – an installation featuring a waxwork of Pope John Paul II struck down by a meteorite (below) – is among his best-known works. Brazenly blasphemous, it offers a twisted visual one-liner – God’s representative on Earth, felled by an act of God – in the manner of a newspaper cartoon.
David Shrigley, Ants Have Sex in Your Beer (2007)
Since graduating from Glasgow School of Art in 1991, Shrigley has won mainstream recognition for his nihilistic, wilfully crude drawings and books, which skewer the absurdities of modern life and everyday feelings of helplessness. The writer Will Self compared them to the scribblings of a serial killer. “I don’t think I’m clinically depressed,” Shrigley once told me. “So, I don’t know where the darkness comes from.”