Farty paintings and getting sozzled on gin: a seriously silly history of art and comedy colliding

A critic once called Simon Munnery’s Edinburgh show “the closest comedy gets to modern art”. The following year, the comedian pursued this idea to its illogical conclusions. Wielding a Venn diagram he illustrated how comedy could abut, but never actually become, art. As a comedian, he could only knock his head vainly against the border dividing the two fields: very far from funny comedy, but not really art. The position on the opposite side of the divide would be an artist condemned to produce “shit art: art that is perilously near being comedy”.

Artist Andy Holden “thought it would be interesting to test that theory in a gallery context, just in case he was wrong”. Holden has dedicated an exhibition to Munnery – What Am I? – showing props, aphorisms and videos from the comedian’s 30-year career, at his gallery in Bedford.

On display are painted Venn diagrams, a pneumatic exclamation-mark hat, cardboard puppet figures of the crucified thieves on Calvary, and a mobile in which Munnery’s character Alan Parker: Urban Warrior appears suspended amid his protest placards. There’s a video of Munnery’s own funeral directed by Holden, and a piercing British update of the Orb’s 1990 ambient house track Little Fluffy Clouds (“What were the skies like when you were young?” “I dunno – grey? Monotonous?”)

“Simon is definitely the artist’s comedian,” says Holden. “His constant innovativeness is enviable: rudimentary drawings are often used in his routines alongside precarious sculptural props, and many of the segments are a straight line, via Andy Kaufman, back to performance art.”

Holden himself is a deadpan performer. In his animated film Laws of Motion in a Cartoon Landscape, he achieves profundity through a classic comedic technique: the application of stringent analysis to something superficially daft. Neighbours for a period in Bedford, Holden and Munnery have collaborated on art and comedy projects. Munnery acted as a tour-guide for a coach-trip performance visiting sites around Bedford linked to Holden’s teenage art movement MI! MS (Maximum Irony! Maximum Sincerity).

Holden, in return, did a support slot for one of Munnery’s shows. “I went in the deep end with a performance unboxing a collection of 200 ceramic cats that my grandma had left me in her will after passing away the week before,” recalls Holden. “It was interesting doing an art performance in a comedy context: in a gallery everything is met with studious, grave silence. The same routine in front of a comedy audience and suddenly tiny things – a turn of phrase or the way you pick up a cup – are met with laughter.”

For Munnery and Holden, the exhibition raises more questions about the overlap between art and comedy than it resolves. One banal but crucial distinction for Holden is that “comedy is rooted in language and art in the visual”.

Does this give comedians with an art school background a distinctive edge? There are a few – Noel Fielding, Adam Buxton, Annie McGrath and Jim Moir (AKA Vic Reeves) – though perhaps not enough to be a phenomenon to compare with art school rock bands. Art school’s not a bad place to start in comedy, says Moir: “Like Roxy Music and the Sex Pistols, all forward-thinking music came out of art school because it’s a forward-thinking place to be.”

On McGrath’s podcast Secret Artists, she interviews comedians while they make art together. Guests have included Katy Wix, whose art skills have served her well, both on Taskmaster and in the 2018 Royal Academy Summer Exhibition, where she exhibited a work called A Little Trump.

McGrath did a foundation course at Chelsea, but after discovering standup “took a hiatus from painting to focus on the true art of making dick jokes on stage”. She has recently come to realise her art and her comedy are more connected than she had thought: “There’s a darkness in both that I’m drawn to.”

One of her paintings even made it on stage for her last Edinburgh show, Shepherd: “a huge canvas showing my depiction of the man who flashed me.” She’s not sure what to do with it now the show is finished. “I haven’t put it on my website but it is for sale, if any of your readers want to buy a 40 x 30 inch penis painting?”

Not all McGrath’s guests are as artistically adept as Wix. “Given the confidence associated with standup, it’s surprising to see how nervous a few guests have been about ‘getting it wrong’,” she says. Perhaps with art, it’s not so easy to laugh things off? “There is a level of sincerity you have to bring to painting which can easily be avoided in comedy: it’s fascinating seeing how people deal with that.”

Here we are discussing art as though there were nothing more to it than pictures and sculpture. Yet it is 103 years since Marcel Duchamp exhibited a urinal in a gallery, and 104 since Dadaist Hugo Ball climbed onstage at the Cabaret Voltaire in Zurich and recited sound poetry: radical art, yes, but also comic gestures both.

A few years ago, Moir was at Cabaret Voltaire on his wedding anniversary. Lent courage by absinthe, he ascended the stage and delivered an extempore song for Europe, “just ‘yes yes yes no no no’ in various European languages”. Later, he returned to make a documentary on Dada for the BBC, and performed Ball’s poem dressed in a paper cone hat. It was not a big leap from the nonsense language and sounds Moir delivers as Vic Reeves. Or, to put it another way, you can trace a direct line back from the comedy of Shooting Stars to Dadaist art performances at Cabaret Voltaire.

At art school, Moir was excited by the newly emergent field of video art. Unlike film, which was expensive and needed to be developed, video was immediate and reusable, giving rise to art that was free spirited and informal. A student favourite was Gilbert & George’s Gordon’s Makes Us Drunk, a black and white short from 1972 in which the artists get decorously pissed on gin. “I liked Gilbert & George: that was my comedy,” says Moir. “I think my comedy’s probably the same as my art, which is kind of abstract, impressionist, emotional. You create an emotion and then you knock it down. You take something the way people are expecting it to go, and then give it a different conclusion.”

Modern art and modern comedy emerged in parallel from movements and countercultures of the 20th century. Frida Kahlo and Diego Rivera adored Charlie Chaplin. There have been whole exhibitions dedicated to the art world legacy of Buster Keaton.

Happenings, performance, video: all these art forms emerged in the same era as experimental comedy, and all, alike, pushed boundaries of propriety. Nam June Paik’s first experiments in video art were shown in 1965 at Cafe au Go Go in Greenwich Village, where the infamous comedian Lenny Bruce was arrested on obscenity charges the year before. Art and experimental comedy were part of the same liberated, drugged-up avant garde.

“It’s the same now,” Moir reminds me. “In the Britpop era, we all knocked about together with Damien [Hirst], Sarah Lucas and people. It was one gang: art and comedy has always come together.”

Artists Rosie Gibbens and Rebecca Moss share a sense of the ridiculous, which informs the surreal, disquieting, often daft tenor of their respective art practices. During a recent performance, Gibbens sat astride giant puckered lips and was slowly spanked by inflated, fan-powered, plastic gloves. Which was funny, then excruciating and then funny again. She cites Stewart Lee’s yen to push a joke beyond its natural elasticity: a comedy technique that translates well into art.

“I’m interested in silly things taken seriously and serious things taken sillily,” she says. “I do think there’s something inherently funny about performance art.”

During lockdown, Gibbens and Moss circulated a compilation of 10 absurdist artist videos, from the brilliantly deranged punk of Quilla Constance’s PR Blitz), in which the artist sings salacious tabloid headlines against a junkyard backdrop, to Jemima Burrill’s Mouthwash, in which human saliva is used to launder a pair of knickers.

Gibbens, who cites the sketch show Smack the Pony as an influence, says she sees the crucial distinctions between art and comedy as context and framing: “An artist’s final aim isn’t the laugh, but it’s a difficult distinction to make.”

I ask Andy Holden where he sees the links between art, comedy, surrealism and video. “There are links between pretty much everything,” he concludes, sagely. “And most often that link is stupidity.”