figure By SUNNY BINDRA I tweeted a
visual joke recently.
To me the
visual joke was obvious; the tiny guy dancing with the big guy, but not everyone thinks in comedy, so I think you should give the benefit of the doubt"
The Tempest, Northern Stage until October 10 I gulped a bit at the opening
visual joke with a washing machine, fearing this was going to be one of those quirky-squirmy takes on Shakespeare, of which I've fidgeted through a few.
He starts with logical efforts, first calling animal control, pest removal companies, and Fran, his mother's friend, but after several attempts at trying to get the horse into a pre-dug grave (another tip of the hat to inevitability) the horse ends up only floating above the grave, like a "sublime
visual joke." Bill tries what seems to be the logical thing of forcing the horse in, but, as Fran says, "Horses can't be forced into anything." As Bill grows frustrated with the logical, he becomes increasingly frantic in his search for control over this situation, and the story ends with him performing an absurd and desperate ritual.
Ian Nairn thought the defiant shopfront of Spiegelhalter's in East London a brilliant
visual joke. While architecture may not lend itself to humour; we should celebrate I buildings that wittily break the rules or resist the dullness of developers.
What he offers is not just a brilliant curiosity or a
visual joke; he also unsettles our perceptions, casually introducing us to the idea that radically different objects (a shrimp and a human nose, for instance) are not so unlike each other as we might have thought.
And the girl in Underworld II, 2004, who encounters a ghostly face of what at first appears to be a pool but could equally be a hole in the ground, has a face seemingly modeled on Edvard Munch's The Scream--a reference that most artists could use only as a
visual joke. Vasquez de la Horra's ability to quote the image in an effectively understated way shows that her visual imagination is subtler than it might at first appear, but also that her affinity with her Norwegian predecessor is deeper than one would expect.
The English misericords, the Malterer embroidery, and the Runkelstein Ywain figure do not offer interpretations of the story as the longer series of murals and manuscript illustrations do: instead they testify to the process of literarization whereby the figure of Ywain became sufficiently well known to be available for uses other than the canonical story, as the focus of a
visual joke in the misericords (Chapter 5), as an example of the Slaves of Women topos in the Malterer embroidery (Chapter 6), and as a generalized example of the literary ideal of knighthood in the Runkelstein triad (Chapter 7).
As if inviting the
visual joke, "Where's Karl?", this fine collection of essays published in the last twenty years invites the same question intellectually.
Some stage prop would certainly have had to be used for this fake infant and its disproportionately large size must have provided an additional
visual joke in this farcical scene of deceit.
BANANA BOOTS 1976 CONNOLLY has always loved a
visual joke and this documentary film of his 1975 tour of Ireland featured his handcrafted banana boots.
His camera swoops and glides, and usually ends on a neat
visual joke (random example: when the spies get delinquent Eggsy sprung from jail, time is compressed so that Eggsy walks out of the police station just a beat or so after a chastened cop walks in to arrange his release).
visual joke - a joke whose effect is achieved by visual means rather than by speech (as in a movie)