Laughing Our way to the Cemetery of Authoritarianism

In Bologna during the 1977 student movement, a popular slogan was "una risata vi seppelirà" (a laughter will bury you all). The protesters, known as Indiani Metropolitani (Metropolitan Indians), were rebelling against what they saw as a conservative and rigid government, and their most effective weapon was irony as protest. It is speculated that Umberto Eco's famous mystery The Name of the Rose (1980), which revolves around a lost book by Aristotle on comedy and the condemnation of conservative monks on the subject, was in fact a response to the political climate of Bologna at the time (Eco was a professor at the University of Bologna).

I am often reminded of this fact during this Trump era, where the current US president displays a particular fixation with laughter. For Trump, the worst ignominy one can possibly suffer is being laughed at. His political career has been marked by his repeated warnings that other countries (such as China and Iran) are "laughing at us." An address Trump delivered at the UN General Assembly in 2018 was met with laughter when he claimed, "in two years my administration has done more than any other administration in the history of our country."¹ And it is believed that President Obama's infamous put-down of Trump (who was pushing for the racist "birther" conspiracy theory about Obama) might have been a great incentive for him pursuing the presidency a few years later.

Laughter is dangerous for someone like Donald Trump because it is powerful and immediate. Humor instantly undresses falsehoods, and through its various strategies it can point to the absurdity and injustice of certain situations and speak truth to power. Earlier in Trumps's term, the filmmaker and activist Michael Moore (who in fact predicted Trump's election) also stated that the only way to defeat Trumpism is through humor (and has acted through this idea by creating a Broadway show titled The Terms of my Surrender). "Humor is the non-violent weapon by which we are going to be able to turn this around," he said in an interview.²

The more urgent question for me in this moment is how humor can act as a political weapon in the highbrow echelons of contemporary art. As I have stated in the past, I believe that visual art practice in general has always had a complicated relationship with humor. There is a dominating seriousness to the history of art, where drama and grand statements often take center stage (the Rembrandts, Velazquez, and Delacroix of the world). Nonetheless, satirical works throughout history are powerful statements not only of the political and cultural moment but also greatly revealing of larger aspects of human nature (this is the case of Hogarth, Daumier, and the Goya of Los Caprichos).

In the twentieth century humor is utilized by some of the avant-gardes (in particular Surrealism and Dada) through the embracing of the absurd, and this continues through the influence of artists like Duchamp in the works of Marcel Broodthaers and, I would argue, John Cage, who in turn influenced Fluxus. Pop Art is, in my view, also an inheritor of that kind of irreverence. Yet, upon a close examination, these various artists embrace a kind of humor that is less social critique and much more the exploration of the eccentricities of the self. An interesting aspect of contemporary art practice is that, while it practices sarcasm and irony, humor is a much less present feature in many artists (Maurizio Cattelan notwithstanding).

Part of the complex relationship between contemporary art and humor is that it is a discipline in which it is important to create an aura of respectability and professionalism as a way to signal that the art presented is relevant and/or significant and not something that should be discarded offhand. This results in the existence of stiff social structures—many of which I have parodied in my own drawings.

But somehow humor—and its most common artistic expression, cartooning—occupies a lesser place than the "serious" forms of art, ostensibly because these point at deeper, more significant issues. But...