Gregory H. Williams, Permissionto Laugh: Humor and Politics in Contemporary German Art

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Notes

1. Rebecca Schuman, “Fruit Seller Proves That Germans Really Do Have a Sense of Humor,” Browbeat: Slate's Culture Blog, July 31, 2014, http://www.slate.com/blogs/browbeat/2014/07/31/german_amazon_parody_fruit_seller_proves_germans_really_do_have_a_sense.html (accessed July 31, 2014).

2. “This Brilliant Amazon Parody Proves That Germans Really Do Have a Sense of Humor” is the title Slate provides when the article is shared via Facebook or Twitter. See Slate's “About Us” page for its affiliation with Amazon, http://www.slate.com/articles/news_and_politics/slate_fare/2006/08/about_us.html (accessed September 1, 2014).

3. “Germany Officially the World's Least Funny Country,” Telegraph, June 7, 2011, http://www.telegraph.co.uk/culture/8560815/Germany-officially-the-worlds-least-funny-country.html (accessed September 1, 2014).

4. Donald Kuspit, Signs of Psyche in Modern and Postmodern Art (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1993), 279.

5. One such instance is his discussion of Herold's Interessante Kunst aus Westdeutschland (1985), pp. 111–12.

6. See Friedemann Weidauer, Alan Lareau, and Helen Morris-Keitel, “The Politics of Laughter: Problems of Humor and Satire in the FRG Today,” in Laughter Unlimited: Essays on Humor, Satire, and the Comic, ed. Reinhold Grimm and Jost Hermand (Madison: University of Wisconsin Press, 1991), 69.

7. On these distinctions, see Carl Hill, The Soul of Wit: Joke Theory from Grimm to Freud (Lincoln: University of Nebraska Press, 1993), 10 n. 2.

8. Ibid.; and Otto F. Best, Volk ohne Witz: Über ein deutsches Defizit (Frankfurt: Fischer Taschenbuch, 1993).

9. Hill, The Soul of Wit, 22.

10. Ibid., 223.

11. Gregg Camfield has been the strongest critic of these models. See Camfield, “Humorneutics,” in Necessary Madness: The Humor of Domesticity in Nineteenth-Century American Literature (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1997), 150–86.

12. On Kippenberger's “sloppy slapstick,” see David Robbins, Concrete Comedy: An Alternative History of Twentieth-Century Comedy (New York: Pork Salad Press, 2011), 322.

13. Here Williams falls in line with traditional contextualist approaches to humor, which stress regional specificities. The classic example of this traditional model in the American art field in which I work is Constance Rourke, American Humor: A Study of the National Character (New York: Harcourt, Brace, 1931).

14. See @NeinQuarterly, featured in Rebecca Schuman, “How a ‘Failed Intellectual’ Became One of the Internet's Favorite Nihilists,” Browbeat: Slate's Culture Blog, April 14, 2014, http://www.slate.com/blogs/browbeat/2014/04/14/nein_quarterly_twitter_feed_of_eric_jarosinski_brings_nihilism_to_the_masses.html (accessed April 14, 2014).

15. See Robbins, Concrete Comedy, 81–86, 315–24.

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Notes on contributors

Jennifer A. Greenhill

JENNIFER A. GREENHILL is associate professor of art history at the School of Art & Design, University of Illinois, Urbana-Champaign [School of Art & Design, 143 Art and Design Building, 408 East Peabody Drive, M/C 590, Champaign, Ill. 61820].