It seems as good a time as any to admit that it makes me laugh very hard to see a person catch fire in a film comedy. I am not entirely sure why this is; the flapping and spinning and runningaround is always pretty much the same. Maybe that's what gets me: Slapstick shorthand for I-am-on-fire, at this point in cinematic history, is so absurdly predictable that I can't help loving it. It is proudly brainless. And full of body; it seems to be all body. Yet anyone performing it has to know they're doing the oldest physical joke in the book, doing a whole history in one great, stupid shake. There is one work of art in the show Playboys & Killjoys at Ambach & Rice in Ballard that evokes in me this same just-beyond-words and just-beyond-brains sensation: It is a sketchy sketch made in felt-tip marker on paper by Markus Vater. A naked man is sitting on the branch of a tree above a pond, contemplating the water, while right above him—like a millisecond from crushing him—there is a grizzly bear, belly up, claws extended, falling from the sky. Is the man actually looking at the reflection of the bear in the water? Why doesn't he just look up at the bear? Why is there a bear falling from the sky? The joke is that there is no sense to be made here. It is all wild senselessness and imminent destruction and naked soft flesh and claws. Ah! Ha! This is as close as I am going to get in this show to rolling around on the floor. It is not very close.
Art, for various reasons, is rarely funny this way. In Playboys & Killjoys, Raymond Pettibon's pointed jabs at the phallus of the American military weren't meant to be gigglers. Neither were Sara Greenberger Rafferty's watery-rainbow-colored portraits of sad-sack standup comedians, or Eric Yahnker's smirk-inducing pile of books called A Full Plate, with Alan Winnington's Breakfast with Mao on top of Derek Hansen's Lunch with Mussolini on top of Heidi Holland's Dinner with Mugabe. Those pieces are funny in a different, darker way.
Maybe it doesn't have to be all arch like that. Does art have to be so controlled? Playboys & Killjoys—which also includes two pieces by Austrian absurdist Erwin Wurm, one being a very precisely cast and hand-painted three-inch-high pickle standing upright on a white pedestal—is named after the 1987 Harry Levin book Playboys & Killjoys. The book has the joy-killing subtitle An Essay on the Theory & Practice of Comedy (also: "Playboys" is a humorless word) but the joy-making chapter title "Zanyism." Contemporary art needs zanyism. True, old, histrionic zanyism. No more sophistication. No more jokes about Duchamp. Absolutely no more jokes about art fairs. In fact, no more jokes about the art world for a while; a moratorium has been called. We are now looking for the vibrating, fleshy, fatalistic spirit of slapstick.
In this regime, the pickle can stay. So can Wurm's photograph Looking for a Bomb 3, in which one person reaches into the pants of another in the name of homeland security. Yahnker's Beegeesus won me over as I fingered through it: He whited-out the entire Bible, except for the letters that sequentially spell "Bee Gees" over and over. It's displayed on a finely carved (read: holy) wood base with a pair of conservator's white gloves so that you can stand there turning these stupid pages, all thick and giddy. Even better is Yahnker's big, sad, elaborately shaded still-life pencil drawing of a bouquet of flowers past its prime—with a frowny face erased from it sloppily, like the drawing's been hit by a tagger. If only the Dutch (inventors of the high-minded still-life) had the frowny face. Yahnker calls it Bummed Bouquet.
Standing around in the back room are a bunch of mic stands with kitchen utensils—whisks, a turkey baster, an ice cream scoop—sitting in the sleeves instead of mics. It's an installation by Greenberger Rafferty, and it's called Testing I–V. Is it funny? Not really. But it captures perfectly the mangled way things can come out when you try to be.