For most people, art is a regular and personal confrontation with someone’s idea of a visual joke. This extreme form of non-natural art became a widespread domestic habit in the early part of the 20^th century as old-style storytelling gave way to joke-a-day cartoons, and syndicated comic strips appeared simultaneously in thousands of newspapers, worldwide. Such a trend continues on a global scale right to the present day. 

I first began to think about the place of irony and humour in mainstream graphic art when I visited a special exhibition of the work of Giandomenico Tiepolo, a major 18th-century Venetian artist.  Subtitled ‘Ironia e comico’, the exhibition was held in 2004 on the Island of San Giorgio Maggiore.  The year marked the passing of 200 years since the death of Tiepolo, whose frescoes for the guest quarters at Villa Valmarana in Vicenza and for his own villa in Zianigo (now conserved at Ca' Rezzonico in Venice) are among the greatest European masterpieces of his time.  It was a surprise to learn that Tiepolo is not known for his frescoes alone. The exhibition revealed the historical value of the artist's drawings - be they sketches of contemporary life that portray the society of the day or interpretations of the figure of Punchinello, a sort of comic mirror image of ordinary man and a bitter portrait of the 'laughable' side of history.

‘Ironia’ was defined as the humerous or mildly sarcastic use of imagery to imply the opposite of what it normally means.  Tiepolo used irony to draw attention to some incongruity or irrationality of what is expected and what actually is.  ‘Comico’ defines an amusing event or sequence of events exposing the life and foibles of a social group.  Tieoplo used both concepts particularly to demonstrate triumph over adversity and the recognition of a reality different from the masking appearance.  His chosen mask was the character ‘Punchinello’.   Polichinelle in French, is a classical male character that originated in the Commedia dell’arte of the 17^th century and became a stock character in Neopolitan puppetry, from which came the English ‘Punch and Judy’ show.  His main characteristic, from which he acquired his name, is his extremely long nose, which resembles a beak. In Latin, this was a pullus gallinaceus, which led to the word "Pulliciniello" and "Pulcinella", related to the Italian pulcino or chick.

Giandomenico’s drawings revive the models employed by his father Giambattista, whose caricatures of Punchinello provided one of the most unique and visually striking examples of the art of 18th-century Europe.

The Punchinello character intrigued the artistic Tiepolos for decades.  He appears in Giambattista's drawings of the 1730s and '50s.  Sometime around 1800 Domenico returned to the subject with gusto, and created 104 wash drawings for the Divertimento per li ragazzi (Entertainment for Children). This masterful series presents a multitude of Punchinellos in a loosely structured tale of Everyman, which begins with the hatching of Punchinello's father from a huge turkey egg, and ends with an apparition of Punchinello's skeleton rising from the grave. The order of the drawings has been much studied, with some authors proposing a roughly chronological order, and others grouping the drawing by subject.  One series follows several drawings in which Punchinello interacts with camels, donkeys, monkeys, and cattle.  In general his work which uses the canvas as a stage in which the curtains have been drawn back has been described as having a theatrical affinity and presaging the serial graphics of the comic strip.  Tiepolo’s took their tribe of Punchinello’s off in a parallel universe of near-surreal fantasy.  

Regardless of their different modes of presentation, most forms of humour work the same, by analogy and metaphor.  They use the images of one reality to describe by implied comparison some other reality.  In comic art, elements of the real world are exaggerated, distorted, simplified and inverted in order to elicit laughter, but there is usually an underlying message about the world as it really is.  The deeper significance of humour first began to be explored in the The Decameron, which the medieval Italian author Giovanni Boccaccio began around the middle of the 14^th century.  It is best known for its bawdy tales of love, appearing in all its possibilities from the erotic to the tragic. Other topics such as wit and witticism, and practical jokes also form part of the literary mosaic.  Two centuries later, the impact of irony and humour in literature, as a powerful mass communication system, was analysed by the 17^th century French Jesuit writer Balthasar Gracian.  He summarised his conclusions as;  "sometimes the things of this world can be truly perceived only by looking at them backwards.”

Gracián uses literary irony and humour in his masterpiece novel El criticón to contrast an idyllic primitive life with the evils of civilization.  His style, called conceptism, is a way of dealing with ideas involving the use of terse and subtle exaggerated wit.  For example, the following quote, “Always leave something to wish for; otherwise you will be miserable from your very happiness”, demonstrates that conceptism is characterized by ellipsis and the concentration of a maximum of significance in a minimum of form.  This approach is referred to in Spanish as agudeza (wit). Gracian constantly plays with words: each phrase becomes a puzzle, using the most diverse rhetorical devices.

Pictorial ellipsis has a longer historical counterpart, which goes back to ancient storytelling through pictures.  In literature, ellipsis is three dots in a row, used as form of shorthand to indicate that part of a sentence or sequence has been omitted.  It is spoken, "dot, dot, dot." One example of the use of an ellipsis is: Smith said, "Rome had many terrible leaders, ... who caused the Empire to fall." Another example is the mathematical series of prime numbers: 1,3,5,9,... (the rest of the

numbers are implied but not written down).  The reader, knowing the rules, has to fill in the space.   A prehistoric example of pictorial ellipsis, not far removed from modern strip cartoons, is exemplified by the story line in the prehistoric Egyptian ‘Hunter's Palette’ in the British Museum,

At the top of the carved stone which is the "beginning" of the image the viewer encounters the leader of the hunting expedition, fitting an arrow to his bow.  Evidently he is just about to shoot a lion attempting to protect its cub. The viewer does not see the flight of the arrow; that fact is logically implied in the concluding sequence of the narrative—namely, the death of the lion after being struck by six arrows, presented at the bottom of the palette. This ellipsis is defined as follows.   At the top of the image the hunter seems to stand in front of the lion to shoot directly at it; their confrontation is face-to-face. At the bottom of the image, however, we discover that the lion has been struck by one arrow in the anal-genital region. In synthesizing the narrative the viewer must reconstitute the moment of the kill as having involved the hunter moving to position himself for a sneak attack from behind. The viewer literally experiences the full story by an imaginative  "filling in" or "filling out" of the narrative as a forward-and backward-looking movement in time.  The earlier passage of depiction (image of the lion about to be killed) is used to reinterpret the later passage (image of the dead lion).

Each work of visual humour, often working through ellipsis, is a conundrum.  It is an invitation to the viewer to participate in a collaborative learning experience. Smiles and laughter on the part of the recipient, even if they are not communicated outwardly, are signs of successful collaborations between artist and receiver.  They denote an admiration for the clever witticism of the visual joke, and at the same time, satisfaction with one's own cleverness in seeing the joke. This function of non-natural art as a communication system is encapsulated in the work of Picasso, who said, “Art is a lie I use to tell the truth.” 

This quote reminds us that graphic tradition of using irony and humour didn’t stop in 1750. Imagined snapshots of commedia characters in action can be found in the work of Aubrey Beardsley, Pablo Picasso and David Hockney down to the serious cartoons of present times. The ultimate use of irony to criticize the West’s colonization and acculturation of the Native world is evident in the works of Maidu artist Harry Fonseca. By merging the symbols of North American popular culture with the Native trickster figure, Coyote, Fonseca creates an ironic modern context that parodies the practices of the dominant culture. Coyote the Trickster becomes Coyote the Culture Hero, elder, politician and healer all rolled into one; in other words, a modern-day shaman whose wisdom and spiritual powers continue to serve his people.