Last year when we were making pieces for the Creative Sound Projects unit, my lecturer at the time said something that made me think. We were supposed to make a course Bandcamp account, where we could all upload our compositions for people to listen to and potentially pay for. It was to be run by us, with different students having different roles assigned to them. Along with a friend, I was assigned the task of finalising a name for the project. That was when my lecturer said something along the lines of “please don’t call it anything tongue-in-cheek because it degrades the value of your art”. It wasn’t exactly those words, but it was something similar.
My immediate reaction was “Why?” – To me, humour is very much a part of the art I would like to create and I think it’s a large part of the art I enjoy. Without going into too much detail on the blog, I have had a lot of traumatic events happen to me over my life, and humour and art have always been an amazing form of escapism for me, as I’m sure is the same for many people. I know it’s just the name of a Bandcamp page, but I do think it opens up an interesting discussion about the role humour plays in art, and how seriously it can be taken.
Until a few months ago, a prejudice against humour in my practice did exist in my head. I never really knew why, I just thought that whilst it’s good to laugh, proper art (and music as well, in my case) tackles difficult issues and takes itself seriously. Then I noticed I was finding it really challenging to sit down and create anything – I really felt as though I was in a slump, or just ‘not very creative’, for a long time. I would have ideas, but I’d say no. It felt as though there were a voice in my head saying “Don’t be ridiculous, that idea is stupid. People will not understand what you’re doing, and it will be less valid than other art”. I was having a hard time creating anything until I decided to just try making silly art and writing funny songs for a little bit to see where it went. I found it so freeing. I found that I love to make art that has a bit of a ‘stupid’ side to it, because I am expressing who I am as a person. To give you an example of what I mean, for my first practical project at LCC I made a piece about my experiences with sleep paralysis and night terrors. It wasn’t a bad piece, but I didn’t enjoy the process of making it either. I think this was because I was recalling intensely traumatic memories. Two weeks before I made the piece, for the first time in my life I had woken up in the middle of the night, sat bolt upright and started screaming because I thought someone was in the room trying to kill me. I had also been experiencing very regular sleep paralysis for around 3 years at that point, where dreams would turn sinister and melt into reality, only for me to wake up with the physical feeling and auditory sensation of a man sitting on top of me, swearing at me, strangling me. Looking back on it, of course I can see why I didn’t enjoy making that piece! I don’t enjoy talking about it now. It was taking me to a mental space I really didn’t want to be in. This year, I’m making a distortion box out a stupid emoji toy I found in a high street charity shop in Kent. Yes, it may not be going as deep inside my psyche as the sleep paralysis piece, but I also feel as though I’m getting myself across more through the art I’m making now. Although in many ways I do come from a position of privilege (white, male, middle class, born in a relatively stable country), I have also had a very difficult life on my own terms and I just want to make art that makes me happy (and hopefully others who feel the same way I do).
None of this is to say that I feel that art that does tackle sensitive issues or just takes itself more seriously is less valid or less enjoyable than humorous art – they are equally as valid. I just feel from my own experience that there can be a preconception that art that doesn’t take itself so seriously at face value doesn’t have a serious message behind it. I’m not the only one who shares the opinion – in a 2020 article for The Guardian, journalist Alexi Duggins writes that there is “no good reason for comedy’s inexplicable lack of recognition as high culture”. He asks if “there is something frivolous about an art form that exists to make people smile?” and gives examples of humour in wider art forms such as films and literature constantly being ignored; for example, out of the past 40 Best Picture awards at the Oscars, only 6 awards have been given to comedic films. Although this is not fully related to sound art, I do feel from my own experiences that within the sphere of art, humour tends to not be taken so seriously.
So, having said all this, I am quite happy to be making a playful piece of art for this unit and I am happy to have accepted humour and comedy as part of my practice who I am as an artist. I think I will still occasionally go back to making pieces with heavier themes, but silliness and being a little tongue-in-cheek is part of who I am and the point I want to get across.
Bibilography
- Duggins, A. (2020) Why is humour so rarely treated as high art?, The Guardian. Guardian News and Media. Available at: https://www.theguardian.com/culture/2020/oct/26/solved-why-is-humour-so-rarely-treated-as-high-art (Accessed: November 22, 2022).