Emotional honesty has long been John Robins’ stock-in-trade, but the Netflix special, The Darkness of Robins, a recording of a show about the end of a relationship, which won him the joint Edinburgh comedy award in 2017, takes self-exposure to a new level. It seems to answer a challenge: if emotional honesty is central to… Continue reading The Darkness of John Robins
Author: emmalmsullivan
Coronavirus memes: visual banter
There’s much that is positive in the abundance of coronavirus comic memes: in their assertions of shared experience and collectivity they clearly do provide a degree of relief. But as units of communication to be exchanged and circulated, they are often only placeholders for real emotion or feeling. Given that the experiences of strain, anger,… Continue reading Coronavirus memes: visual banter
Comedy as capitulation
Thanks to Hannah Gadsby, we are now familiar with some of the risks of comedy – the ways in which the obligation to get a laugh necessitates the smoothing out or simplification of stories, often at personal cost. She showed how comedy can be a kind of accommodation – a way of managing lived experience… Continue reading Comedy as capitulation
Armando Iannucci’s David Copperfield
All too often humour is seen as somehow secondary to satire - Harry Levin, for instance, describes satire as ‘purposeful comedy’, with the implication that humour alone is insufficient. Indeed, as the privileged critical category, satire often serves ‘to defend comic art against charges of frivolity’ (Green 106). This tendency is understandable given the distinctions… Continue reading Armando Iannucci’s David Copperfield
Jojo Rabbit
Jojo Rabbit has been nominated for 6 Oscars, and has just won a Bafta, so, despite the very mixed reviews, it’s clearly appealing to many. For me, it brought to mind other well received films that were similarly muddled – Three Billboards Outside Ebbing, Missouri for example. The Oscars often favour films which take on… Continue reading Jojo Rabbit
Seth Rogen’s Shamelessness
Obliviousness is a crucial component of comic license. And our pleasure in obliviousness is partly pleasure in witnessing and sympathetically participating in the avoidance of humiliation, a condition which we are acutely and continually preoccupied with evading. While a relish for resilience and recovery is at the core of our enjoyment of obliviousness, part of… Continue reading Seth Rogen’s Shamelessness
Maurizio Cattelan: ‘Comedian’
Many of the responses to Maurizio Cattelan’s ‘Comedian’ – the banana taped to the wall at Art Basel Miami Beach – take a familiar stance, decrying a fundamental superficiality or worse in his comic approach - intent to defraud, for instance, or a desire to ‘put one over’ on the audience. Jerry Saltz for one,… Continue reading Maurizio Cattelan: ‘Comedian’
Shona Macnaughton: Progressive?
Shona Macnaughton is one of four artists in the new exhibition at the National Gallery of Modern Art in Edinburgh, the sixth and final instalment in the NOW series. While the show as a whole has much to commend it, the room documenting her performance of 2017, Progressive, is particularly intriguing. Introduced as relating to ‘the politics… Continue reading Shona Macnaughton: Progressive?
Twitter Wit
Social media activity is frequently condemned by commentators for fostering an ‘instrumental mode of grasping the world as a collection of objects for control, consumption and accumulation’ (Schwarz 85) thus engendering an exploitative attitude to creativity and sociability. For Ori Schwartz for instance, ‘this exploitation of the present’ leads to ‘the constant search for valuable… Continue reading Twitter Wit
Jeff Koons: is he for real?
Jeff Koon’s new sculpture, Bouquet of Tulips, which commemorates the victims of terror attacks in France in 2015 and 2016, has just opened in Paris. As is the case with most of his work, the piece has prompted considerable critical suspicion, largely about the purity of his intentions. Offered as a gift by the artist in… Continue reading Jeff Koons: is he for real?
Humour in the Arts 