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| The Sunday Times |
| Sunday, 08 June 2003 |
Two artists are exploring our sense of humour — and revealing some painful truths.
The Sunday Times - Culture Section - Stephen Armstrong 8.6.03
Laughter is, if you’ll pardon the pun, a funny thing. Some of the records that made me laugh as a boy are unlistenable to now. Indeed, some of the recordings that made me laugh last year are unlistenable to now. But there’s one record that makes me laugh every time I hear it, no matter what, no matter when. You probably know it. It’s Elvis, at the peak of his Vegas-jumpsuit-burger-drug-blob phase, singing Are You Lonesome Tonight? live and lapsing into uncontrollable hysterics when he mischievously sings: “Do you gaze at your bald head and wish you had hair?” No matter how hard he tries, he is unable to pull himself together, stumbling out a few more lines before collapsing again. Behind him, the backing singer continues unmoved, delighting Elvis further. “Sing it, baby, sing it!” he guffaws, dissolving into deep, throaty giggles again. It is impossible to listen to this recording without laughing. It is so infectious, so compulsively ticklish that it defies trends in humour and complex social references. It is laughter as a communicable disease.
It was a similar record that prompted one of the most unusual installations of the year so far — Laughing Matters, which opened at the Vinyl Factory in Soho for a brief run at the end of April and has now been snapped up to tour the Brompton Hospital, the Port Eliot Literary Festival and the Your Shout Awards in Winchester, with further dates to come. The artist who instigated the project, Nicola Green, had spent long years of her life ending late-night chats with her friend Joshua Compton to a dadaist record made in Berlin in the 1920s, of a man and a woman playing the trombone and making themselves laugh. When Joshua died seven years ago, Nicola became obsessed with tracking down the recording and then, nine months ago, when the roof of her studio collapsed, leaving her unable to paint — although she didn’t see the funny side for a while — she decided to embark on re-creating the record, using a portable Laughing Booth, which toured the country allowing people to laugh in private into a microphone.
Shortly afterwards she met the film-maker Lara Agnew, who had recently lost her mother, and the two set about adding filmed portraits of people laughing to the beautiful picture-vinyl record Green was preparing. The exhibition now includes both, although it varies in form depending on the space. The basic ingredients include the Laughing Booth, where people now listen to the record; screens showing the short film; and a mounted exhibit of the record, decorated in picture-disc form like a vibrant gothic birthday cake. “I think we were drawn to laughter because it seems to be as much about pain and embarrassment as it is about fun and good times,” Agnew explains. “It’s also, we learnt, the only time all parts of your brain fire at once, apart from at the moment of orgasm.”
And there is something curiously sexual about the extended series of short films that Agnew and Green have laced together to make the 18-minute footage. Five people feature in the film. Each had a camera pointed at them and was asked to laugh without the aid of jokes, tickling or unusual chemicals. The first, Paul, struggles but manages to laugh. It’s pleasant, but not quite infectious — it feels a little unsatisfying. The second, Neelum, nearly gets us there, but the third, Justin, actually seems a little offensive. He tries to set himself off using strange tricks that appear to mock the process, tricks you imagine actors might use to create a stage laugh. He fails, and you feel vaguely empty.
The fourth laugher, Claire, really gets going. At times, little oohs slip from her as she tries to rein herself in but finally succumbs, only to be followed by Taz. Taz is Elvis. Laughter pours from him in a contagious torrent. It’s out of his hands. He’s given himself up to it, just as you remember laughing as a child, laughing so much that you felt real pain rather than sneering from the corner of your mouth like you do today. (The older people are, the less they laugh, it turns out.) When he finally stops after seven minutes, we are all spent — laugher and observer together.
“We did try to structure it a bit like having sex,” Green admits. “Paul is the foreplay, there’s the build, the anticlimax of Justin, and finally Paul goes over the top and it bursts out. At the launch for the work in Soho, people felt they’d been curiously intimate with Paul. They kept coming up and chatting to him as if they knew him. He found it unsettling.”
In many ways, the record is equally unsettling. The laughter flows together and echoes — much more dada than haha. The record is for sale. It comes mounted in a frame. “It’s designed to be hung on the wall as a work of art, and the laugh track is the secret it contains,” says Green.
During the making of the project, the artists approached various celebrities whose laughter can be heard on the record. Comedians Arthur Smith and Mark Steel provided their chuckles, Clive Anderson recorded some boys in the Amazon laughing while working on a Radio 4 project, and Prunella Scales re-created Sybil Fawlty’s rattling bark. The artists also talked to Rowan Atkinson, who said he felt that people laughed at Mr Bean because they were accessing their own sorrow, fear and misery.
Which analysis raises an interesting point. After all, laughter always has a rather difficult place in art. If something is funny, it is usually deemed silly, irrelevant or, at best, low art. Usually the only way someone working in fields associated with laughter can be taken seriously is to die by their own hand or to be French. In The Name of the Rose, Um- berto Eco explores this prejudice. The plot turns on an imaginary lost tome by Aristotle in praise of comedy. So irate does the existence of this treatise make the 14th-century Catholic church — which believes that all the works of God are perfect and to laugh at them is to consort with the devil — that a monk takes steps to ensure all who encounter the book die horribly. But if laughter is opening a wound, does it not deserve the attention that heartbreak receives from today’s tortured troubadours?
Installations designed for those with funny bones
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