To start with I’ll partly answer the question in the title. There are around 49,000 artists in the UK which is more or less 0,0029117647058824 artists per hectare of agricultural land. This would seem to be a sustainable number but of course doesn’t take into account that artists consume materials other than food and tend to reproduce with each other thus making more artists. The net reproduction rate (R0) of UK artists is around 2.163 which is much higher than the R0 for the population in general which is 0.753. This means that by 2132 the entirety of the UK population will be artists.
By the way, comically speaking, the main title works at 4.72 different levels.
Comedy and humour
A number of people have failed to realise that I often use humour in my articles for dramatic effect and to, at the very least, elicit a Duchenne smile (the simultaneous contraction of the zygomatic major and orbicularis oculi muscles). Connoisseurs however will have noted the deadpan (dry humour, or dry-wit humour) usually done as a rising gradation and how I often use a terminal bathos. They may have also appreciated my strict adherence to the comedy ‘rule of three’ and my delicate use of irony "the expression of one's meaning by using language that normally signifies the opposite, typically for humorous or emphatic effect". They will just have enjoyed the juxtaposition of ‘delicate’ and ‘irony’ which works comically at 2.7 different levels.
Example of a Duchenne smile with the zygomatic major and orbicularis oculi muscles fully activated
There is as yet no general nor relative theory of comedy and laughter but from a neuroscience point of view we can take delight in the two almost separate neural pathways involved in laughter. The ‘emotionally driven’ system, which involves the amygdala, thalamic/hypo‐ and subthalamic areas and the dorsal/tegmental brainstem. And the ‘voluntary’ system which originates in the premotor/frontal opercular areas and leads through the motor cortex and pyramidal tract to the ventral brainstem.
Great stuff and understanding it goes a long way to helping us better appreciate good comedy in the same way that a butterfly pinned in a museum case helps us appreciate the full beauty of the insect. As with anything however it’s all contextual, I avoid using puns because the cortical activation they provoke is to be found in the left posterior middle temporal gyrus and the left inferior frontal gyrus. Semantic humour, which I prefer, activates the left posterior middle temporal gyrus, the left posterior inferior temporal gyrus, the right posterior middle temporal gyrus and the cerebellum. More bang for your buck as the expression goes.
Reactions to comedy also seem to be partly modulated by a persons social class and upbringing. The more intellectual a person the less they can react spontaneously to humour. Indeed their response to humour, even when surrounded by people who are laughing heartily, is to say “wow, that was funny” accompanied by a non-Duchenne smile.
Example of a non-Duchenne smile,the zygomatic major and orbicularis oculi muscles aren’t activated. This can occur after a Botox treatment.
This brings me around to something that has always got up my bugle (nose), being told all my life what is ‘high level, sophisticated art’ and what isn’t. As far as I can work it out this formatting came to us from the elites, the bourgeoisie and aristocracy of olden times and has been maintained by today’s ‘cultured, intellectual and sophisticated’ people and the art market. We can go to an art gallery and see people dancing figures of eight, or eight million dollars, around splashes of oil on canvas or an aesthetic jumble of whatever, each showing off their erudition to their friends, each thinking that it’s a financial investment, all knowing that it’s a fraud.
I know I’ve got some emotional baggage, back when I was a sprog the art teacher explained that if you can’t draw you can’t do art. This resulted in a class divided, those like me who couldn’t wield a pencil or paintbrush were sent to the back and told to ‘just get on with something’. The others, a minority elite who could draw, actually got taught some stuff about how to do art, this happened again in the next school. Later on I was told that music is art too and that made me wonder why the art classes were specifically named ‘art’ and the music classes ‘music’. Very confusing for someone like me and made worse when other people explained that theatre, poetry, dance and a whole bunch of other things were art too yet none were included in the ‘art’ class. I also noted that none of these people mentioned comedy which apparently, amongst the art elite, isn’t considered to be real art. Comedy, it seems, is something that ordinary people love but that’s because they don’t have the training to be able to really appreciate ‘proper art’. I had a few things to say when I heard that but using rude words is a cheap way to get laughs so I won’t recount them here.
I’ve chatted with any number of paint slapping artists and none have been able to explain to me what art is, they can, however, explain what art isn’t. I’ve been told, for example, that an artwork has no functional use, if it does it’s artisanal. That said they also explained that a functional object could be used in an artwork, the artisanal aspect of said object being subsumed into the whole and thus relieved of it’s functional aspect and elevated into art. A lot of art critics speak like that, they even get paid for it. This led me to my first understanding, art is art because it’s done by an artist. This does smack of logical tautology, a statement that is true by virtue of its logical form alone.
More recently I thought to myself that I may have an idea for an article and then I’ll set about writing it down. Someone else may have a similar idea but because they can paint, draw or sculpt they express the idea in their way which is fair enough.
The artists with whom I’ve chatted all spoke about the impact that a great artwork has on people. Mind and life changing stuff apparently and recent research has shown that ‘visual art interventions have stabilizing effects on the individual by reducing distress, increasing self-reflection and self-awareness, altering behaviour and thinking patterns, and also by normalizing heart rate, blood pressure, or even cortisol levels’. Wonderful stuff. I would maintain however that comedy, followed by music, are much more efficient at accomplishing the above than those art-forms generally seen as being ‘higher’ and have a smaller carbon footprint.
I recently worked out that a good semantic joke produces around 1.2 Mg CO 2-eq joke −1 yr −1. My calculation didn’t include the extra Co2 produced through laughter which can be considerable and is why comedy theatres need good ventilation. I am developing a suit that can be worn to comedy shows that recycles the Co2 and stores it in a mineral form.
It’s still in a prototype phase, all members of the audience would have to wear one if not then one person would end up carrying the total mineral load produced by everyone else. If the comedy show is very good this could be a substantial weight. Another solution would be carbon offsetting, audience members would plant a tree somewhere humorous, or a humorous tree in an ordinary spot, before going to the show.
At this point some readers may think this is all tongue in cheek (characterized by irony or whimsical exaggeration) but I’ve had some painful experiences and avoid putting my tongue in my cheek or anyone else’s for that matter. Yes, yes, OK, this article is characterized by irony and whimsical exaggeration but in the end it’s all about points of view and seeing, if only for an instant someone else’s viewpoint. I went to the Chauvet caves, actually the Chauvet caves(2) which is a fibreglass reproduction of the original, pretty well done I must admit. The caves are promoted as being the ‘first great artistic masterpiece of humanity’ which sounds like someone using exaggeration for comic effect. Having been told this the visitors stumble around lost in awe which isn’t in fact their own awe but one they picked up from the marketing. What did I see from my point of view? The tribe coming back after gathering and hunting to find that the kids had covered the caves with graffiti and getting upset about it as people still do unless of course it was done by a proper artist like Banksy. I tried sharing this point of view with the group that I was with but the staff asked me to leave. The comics I talk about below would probably count this reaction as ‘wokism’ gone mad.
Globally, and thus personally, we are faced with a lot of problems and one thing that gets overlooked is that too many people take themselves much too seriously and seem totally self-obsessed. I laugh at those people who accuse me of this, hahaha, at the same time of course I worry that they might be right. It would help a lot if people were better able to laugh at themselves and see things from different points of view. It often seems like they’ve got blinkers on, ‘this is the way and all others are false paths’. Having a broader mind and cultivating the capacity to appreciate other points of view is essential if we want to move along and sort things out. Anything which helps people do this is good, I would contend however that comedy does this best of all. Good comedy can, in a heartbeat, rip the blinkers off and broaden the mind. An expression that we sometimes hear is ‘laughing wholeheartedly’, interesting that laughter is associated with the heart, presumably in it’s metaphorical sense and not the organic pump one.
The dark side of comedy
Unfortunately some comics are able to be just as self-absorbed as anyone else. They maintain that ‘wokism’ and the ‘extreme left’ have made comedy impossible. The argument seems to turn around the idea that if you can’t insult people then comedy dies. I thought initially that these comics were trying to be comical and then I realised they were actually being serious which seems antonymic. Perhaps they should change job and move to one where insulting people can help one’s career, politics maybe? Today it’s called ‘roasting’ someone, which is seen to be different to ‘insulting them’ although it sounds like the same thing.
Comedy can be used to drag someone down, it is, and has been used to abuse groups of people, for the most part groups seen as being different or minority. Women, for example, pay a heavy price, blond jokes, Essex girl jokes, and simple straightforward misogyny have been a staple for bar jibes and comedy routines for far too long. Comedy at it’s most noble can, as I mentioned, help broaden our minds, it’s dark side does the opposite. They both demonstrate the power of comedy but anything which is abusive and denigrating is just another form of bullying and totally out of order. My tongue is definitely not in my cheek here.
According to the ‘rule of three’ I can’t use the tongue/cheek thing again which is OK because this is the end of the article. I hope you enjoyed it.