The Art Blague as a Nonverbal Joke
Daniel Barbiero
May 2025
The modern understanding of jokes begins in 1905. That was the year Freud published Jokes and Their Relation to the Unconscious. Freud’s account of jokes laid the foundation for how we think of jokes – what they are, how they work, what they really mean – and while the foundation has shown a number of cracks and fissures over the years, it still has served as a ground on which subsequent accounts have been built. The basic idea is that the joke consists of an unexpected use of language – as a remark, rejoinder, or observation – that has the function of providing humorous cover for the expression of a thought or impulse, generally of a sexual or aggressive nature, that otherwise could not be expressed directly because the joker, under pressure of social norms governing respectable behavior, represses such thoughts and impulses. By allowing expression of the inexpressible, the joke allows the joker to release these inhibited or prohibited thoughts; it is a cathartic experience through which he or she finds a way of overcoming or getting around inhibitory barriers.
Cathartic, and pleasurable. In fact to borrow a formula from Freud’s later paper “Humour,” the joke asserts the pleasure principle over the reality principle. To be sure, in “Humour” Freud distinguishes “humour,” which covers a particularly dark or “black” strain of joking that Freud argues is deployed to wrest control over, and ultimately rise above, especially adverse circumstances, from wit and the simply comic. But I believe what Freud says of the essential structure of “humour” – that it represents the overcoming of the reality principle by the pleasure principle – applies even to jokes that don’t arise within dire conditions. We can if we wish transpose it from its original minor key into a major key. For if the reality principle represents one’s taking account of and appropriately responding to the reality of one’s world, and the prohibition against directly expressing aggression represents one important aspect of one’s reality, then the inhibition of that expression, in effect, represents the reality principle in action. By finding a way around this inhibition the joke, with the catharsis it brings to the joker, provides a practical way for the pleasure principle to assert itself over the reality principle. The joke’s relationship to the reality principle is an important and complex one, and something we’ll come back to later.
An Anatomy of the Joke
In Multitude: Between Innovation and Negation, Paolo Virno offers an alternative analysis of jokes, but one that can be read as a rejoinder to, as well as an elaboration of, aspects of Freud’s theory. Virno defines jokes as “well defined linguistic games…whose remarkable function consists…in exhibiting the transformability of all linguistic games…(p. 73) [they bring out] the state of exception” that is implied in every norm or rule (p. 74) and demonstrate “how many different ways one can apply the same rule” (p. 119). An essential feature of the joke is that it is a social phenomenon – “an innovative action carried out in the public sphere in the presence of neutral spectators…[that] undermines and contradicts the prevalent belief system of a community…” (p. 129). It requires a public to witness it, and a social sphere to provide it a context and a target all at once. The joke for Virno, in sum, involves using language in an unusual way (e.g., playing on double meanings of words, substituting a homophone for the expected word, etc.) that bends a given rule of usage or norm of social interaction – decreeing a “state of exception,” as Virno, borrowing a term from Carl Schmitt, characterizes it – and in the process reveals a new way of using the rule or of interacting. By doing so, it defies the ordinary rules of making sense within the language game in question, calls an uncomfortable attention to them and exposes them as being malleable and, ultimately, arbitrary. From there it’s a short step to the joke’s real achievement, what Virno calls its “point of honor,” which is to “illustrat[e] the questionable nature of the opinions lying beneath discourses and actions…by push[ing] one single belief to the limit, to the point of extracting absurd and ridiculous consequences from it” (p. 94).
Virno’s analysis of the joke, it seems to me, complements Freud’s and makes explicit, and subsequently elaborates, some of the assumptions at work in Freud’s analysis. For all of Freud’s emphasis on the joke’s function as the expression of an individual thought, the effectiveness of this form of expression isn’t fully intelligible unless we know something of the conditions within which it works, and hence of the mechanisms through which it works. There is more to it than repressions within the individual psyche, in other words. To be sure, although Freud’s theory of jokes focuses on the individual, psychological aspects of joking, it doesn’t neglect the social dimension involved. For its precisely the socially imposed restriction on expressing what the joke, in disguised form, in fact expresses, that gives the joke its reason to be and indeed makes it necessary. By providing the cathartic experience it does, Freud claimed, the joke helps dissipate tensions that otherwise would threaten to undermine social life. In evading, temporarily and surreptitiously, prohibitions against expressing urges that if expressed would destabilize the social order the joke, in its own way, helps to ensure social stability.
Virno’s emphasis on the role of social norms and rules, rather than on the individual psychology of the joker, reframes Freud’s theory of jokes in a way that takes the reality behind the reality principle as its main point of attack. This reality isn’t the reality that Stevens described as the “eye’s plain version,” but rather the reality that Slavoj Žižek characterized as consisting in “the constraints of what is experienced as ‘possible’ within the symbolically constructed social space” (Žižek, p. 167). This is the reality of a human lifeworld, with its meanings, conventions, practices, presuppositions, and so on the reality of the language and culture through which we experience and understand the world around us.
If we understand the joke as a phenomenon that takes place within and against the limits of what is possible within a symbolically ordered lifeworld, we can see where the Freudian idea of humor as the assertion of the pleasure principle over the reality principle converges on Virno’s idea of the joke as an intervention aimed at creating a state of exception in regard to social norms and rules. Freud’s reality principle just is the individual’s recognition of the symbolically structured lifeworld with its complex of the norms and rules that Virno’s analysis emphasizes. At the same time, Virno’s insistence on the joke’s capacity to create a situation in which the ordinary norms and rules break down shows us where Freud’s pleasure principle comes into play. Simply put, the joke affords the joker the pleasure of twitting those rules and norms – pushing them to absurd extremes, finding new possibilities within them that previously were unknown to them, and ironically honoring them in the breach rather than in the observance. The state of exception just is the condition for the possibility of the pleasure principle asserting itself over the reality principle. What we get from this convergence of Freud and Virno, then, is something like a unified theory of jokes as essentially pleasurable verbal actions that use – or deliberately misuse – the ordinary rules of some social practice or milieu in a novel way, thus opening up new possibilities within the symbolically structured reality of the social space. Within the lifeworld.
The baseline commonality shared by Freud and Virno is the idea that jokes are by nature verbal – actions undertaken through and with language. But must that always be so? I don’t think so. On the contrary, a joke doesn’t need to be verbal in order to assert itself over the reality principle as Freud would have it, or to perform the innovative function Virno describes. To be sure, the example both Freud and Virno use for epitomizing jokes is the witty remark, but it also is true that a joke may be witty just the same, and may decree a state of exception just the same, without a word being said.
The Art Blague as a Nonverbal Joke
There is a type of joke, specific to the artworld, that’s perpetrated with objects or gestures rather than witty remarks. In France, in which the history of these artworld jokes is especially strong, they’re called blagues: mocking put-ons with a sarcastic edge, jokes that carry a sting in the tail. If we drop the requirement that the joke take the form of a witty remark or other kind of verbal intervention, we can see that the art blague is in essence a joke that both affords the triumph of the pleasure principle over the reality principle and potentially faces a rule with a disabling exception.
When it’s more than a simple put-on, the art blague is a sophisticated practical joke. It presupposes an intricate and well-developed background consisting of a tangle of precedents, assumptions, theories, and conjectures regarding the artwork: what it is and isn’t; what and who validates it; how it means; its status as expressive statement or luxury good; and so forth. This background is a publicly accessible structure whose norms, which may or may not be articulated in explicit statements and rules but may instead consist in habitual patterns of behavior informed by unarticulated assumptions, constitute the usual order of things. The artwork, in other words, is situated within a complex ecosystem. This ecosystem, within which the work takes up a position or is denied a position, in essence constitutes its reality principle. It is this principle that the art blague, as a joke, pushes up against.
Perhaps the best known – or most notorious, take your pick — art blague is Duchamp’s Fountain of 1917, the urinal that Duchamp, under the fictitious name “R. Mutt,” provocatively submitted to an unjuried, open art exhibit sponsored by the Society of Independent Artists. Duchamp’s submission confronted the organizers with a no-win situation: if they rejected Fountain they could only do so by breaking their own rule of accepting any work that had been accompanied by the required entry fee, which “Mutt” had paid; but if they accepted it, they were forced to display as art something that clearly wasn’t art by any definition they would recognize. Whichever choice they made would throw them into a contradiction, either of the exhibit’s rules or of what they believed constituted a legitimate work of art. Duchamp, the future member of France’s national chess team, had checkmated them. Fountain exposed the untenability of the Society’s open admission rule when faced with an exception, by showing how acting in conformity to the rule led to an absurd result.*
For all its appearance as a superficial joke that anything can be passed off as art – comparable to the blague pulled on the 1910 Salon des Indépendants by Roland Dorgelès, who exhibited a painting made by a brush tied to the tail of a donkey named Lolo – Fountain’s effectiveness as a joke, meaning its seriousness as a joke, rested on its ability to engage with the complex set of assumptions and conventions generally taken for granted in the artworld of its time, confronting them with an exception that threatened to overthrow them. It was generally assumed that in order to count as an artwork an object had to have been created by the artist in some way – it had to have been crafted or modeled by hand – and had to have some kind of inherent aesthetic value or function that set it apart from ordinary, non-art objects. Fountain was an obvious exception in that it met neither condition. By being offered up as an art object, it inevitably raised a challenge to the norms by which the art object conventionally was defined.
Although Duchamp’s submission of Fountain began as a nonverbal joke, it eventually acquired a dense theoretical justification. Not so much by Duchamp, who rarely explained himself in any detail, but by others. In the process, this originally mute gesture became steeped in language and became the object of an elaborate discourse. It took on language at the moment that language took it on. But for all of the intellectual superstructure it has given rise to, and for all its success in forcing the exception to become the rule, as the subsequent history of art attests, Fountain remains a blague: an ironic joke at the expense of an artworld Duchamp apparently wished to take down a notch.
It’s Fountain’s long-term success in redefining the rule through its exceptionality that makes it remarkable. On the one hand, the state of exception Fountain provoked counts as a local instance of exception: the rules Fountain pushed to an exception were the rules of the Society of Independent Artists. But on the other hand, the exception Fountain raised ultimately wasn’t just to the explicit rule regarding the acceptance of properly paid for entries but to a deeper, implicit rule. Duchamp’s joke played on both the foreground and the background norms, in other words, but it was in terms of the background norms that it opened up the possibility of a more general state of exception. That new possibility had to do with the definition of the artwork, which Fountain challenged, and which was realized in the eventual acceptance of hitherto unacceptable objects as artworks. Although it began as a challenge to a local rule, Fountain ended up upending a global assumption regarding the defining criteria of the artwork, and thus worked a change in the reality principle of the art world.
Crisis and Innovation
Why a blague like Fountain could cause a change in the reality principle of the artworld as it did is a question that Virno can shed some light on.
Such a change is possible, Virno claims, when it has “roots…[in] the crisis of a form of life” (p. 151, emphasis in the original), a crisis discernible when the presuppositions and norms undergirding a group’s ordinary way of doing things become destabilized. An opening then arises in which otherwise unorthodox interpretations or deviant uses of the underlying rules and norms can themselves become the rules and norms of a new orthodoxy. The crisis consists of the breakdown of the “propositions that express a series of unquestionable truths” (p. 155), in relation to which judgments of truth and falsity, orthodoxy and unorthodoxy, can be made. I would emphasize that these “unquestionable truths” are originally largely a matter of tacit or unarticulated practices and presuppositions. It is when they no longer are effective or somehow are found defective that they become the objects of explicit reflection, formulation, and criticism – not necessarily in that order. This shift in status from the implicit to the explicit is, in fact, the primary symptom of a state of crisis. We know we are in a state of crisis when there is a need to express this background in a set of propositions, because this ordinarily unstated substrate has been made subject to a questioning in response to which the old silent answers no longer suffice.
And here the Society of Independent Artist obliges us. William Glackens, the president of the Society’s board of directors, was quoted in a New York Herald article on the Fountain incident as saying that the piece was “by no definition a work of art” (Tomkins, p. 182).While Glackens did not go on to define what a work of art was, his declaration of what a work of art isn’t represents the usual first step in making the implicit explicit when forced by an exception to the implicit norm: asserting that something is not what it purports to be. Rejection first, reasoning – or rationalization – later.
With Fountain, Duchamp confronted the rule with an exception that could not be handled in the usual way or dismissed out of hand, and thus precipitated a crisis. But it was a crisis whose groundwork had already been laid. Previous advanced art movements – Impressionism, Fauvism, Cubism, Futurism – had already opened up fault lines within the artworld in regard to acceptable possibilities for the formal language of painting. In addition, their advocates, in justifying the new art in well-articulated, theoretical terms, raised certain taken-for-granted presuppositions regarding art and the artwork to the level of explicit reflection and questioning. By 1917, the ground under art was unstable. It took Fountain to push this already fluid situation to the point of a full-blown crisis and eventually – because changes to forms of life take time – to replace the old criteria regarding what is and isn’t a legitimate work of art with new, and much more radical, criteria.
Fountain and the New Reality Principle
As a historical matter, the result of Duchamp’s blague was the eventual transformation of the reality principle in force for the artist and the artwork. Fountain engendered a new set of principles, practices, and presuppositions which entailed – to cite Žižek’s formula – new constraints regarding what was experienced as possible within the social space of the professional art world, and hence opened the way to the appearance of new rules and norms. The most fundamental new rule or norm that Fountain established, whether or not that had been Duchamp’s intention, was that art isn’t art by virtue of any inherent aesthetic properties, but is so largely by virtue of external determinations. And it is these determinations, in turn, that provide the constraints on what is possible for art and the artist within the social space of the current artworld. Thus we see the foundation of a new reality principle rooted in social or institutional, rather than aesthetic, considerations. When art has become post-aesthetic, as it arguably has since the second decade of the last century, an artwork is more than a material object (or performance or even a concept) with a certain sensuous quality; it is a possible position within the specialized network of institutions, artists, buyers, sellers, and so forth that constitutes the artworld as such. This network is the artwork’s ecosystem – its reality – in relation to which it’s possible for a work to be an artwork at all.
Post-Fountain one of the principles within this ecosystem is that of a certain deference granted to the artist and the artwork in terms of which whatever the former offers as art is accepted as such, all else being equal. Within the terms of this deference an artwork no longer is defined by its mode of production or its aesthetic content, but rather by the intention behind it. We can see an early statement of this new criterion – written specifically to justify Fountain – in the second and last issue of The Blind Man, an ephemeral publication put out by Duchamp, Henri-Pierre Roché, and Beatrice Wood in connection with the Society of Independent Artists exhibition. Exactly who wrote the statement is still a matter of dispute. It may have been dictated by Duchamp to Beatrice Wood; it may have been written by either or both of Duchamp’s co-editors or by all three; it may even have been written by Walter Arensberg, Duchamp’s patron and collector. (We might note as an aside the role Arensberg’s ostentatiously purchasing Fountain may have had in legitimizing the piece as an artwork.) In any event, the statement declared that through the act of choice, “Mutt” had “created a new thought” that changed the status of the object he chose – elevated it, in fact — from a plain plumbing fixture to a work of art. This new counter-criterion, embodied in Fountain and other readymades, was the witty response to the old criteria of crafting and aesthetic content – the criteria that determined the artwork’s old reality principle. Now, it was just the thought that counted.
Which raises one last question: what was the thought behind Duchamp’s Fountain? What motivated him? It’s a dangerous question to ask of an artist so notoriously inscrutable, but we can at least speculate on an answer. In interviews Duchamp often said that he did the things he did because they “amused” him. All in all, a rather benign-sounding motivation. And it’s true that much of his post-1912 art output – the things he made or did after Nude Descending a Staircase – does seem to consist of witty gestures or comic inventions. But the appropriate response to much of what he did feels like it should be a smirk rather than a good-natured laugh. It may well have been for the pure pleasure of pulling off a prank that he submitted Fountain to the Society. But it’s hard not to see his gesture as a case of an indirect expression of aggression or hostility toward an artworld he was, at best, ambivalently disposed toward. Was it just amusement? Aggression? But why not both? After all, it was that least trivial of things – a joke.
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*Interestingly, we don’t really know how exactly the Society responded to Duchamp’s provocation. Accounts vary as to what happened. According to the New York Herald article, ten members of the Society’s board of directors met shortly before the exhibition’s private opening, at which time “Mr. Mutt’s defenders were voted down by a small margin” (Tomkins, p. 182). Does this mean the piece was rejected? That’s implied, and would explain Duchamp’s resigning from the board in protest, which he did. But speaking with Pierre Cabanne in 1966, Duchamp was clear that Fountain wasn’t rejected as such – “it was simply suppressed” (Cabanne, p. 54). The Blind Man editorial somewhat confuses the issue by claiming that “[w]ithout discussion, [it] disappeared and never was exhibited” and then describing it as having been “refus[ed],” which would seem to imply rejection. (Quoted in Tomkins, p. 185.) If Duchamp’s recollection is correct, it seems to have occupied a kind of limbo of being neither rejected nor exhibited. But perhaps this is a limbo of semantics only. Either way, its treatment represents a state of exception. By virtue of not being exhibited, it was treated in a manner that fell outside of the rule: an artist whose work had been accepted would reasonably expect that the work would be shown. That’s the norm, that’s how things are supposed to be done. But its rejection, in direct contradiction to the Society’s rule, would very obviously count as an extra-legal action as well. What to conclude? Maybe that because of the uncertainty that naturally accompanies them, crisis situations often just are occasions for this kind of equivocation.
References:
Pierre Cabanne, Dialogues with Duchamp, tr Ron Padgett (New York: Da Capo, 1971). Internal cites to Cabanne.
Sigmund Freud, “Humour,” in The International Journal of Psycho-Analysis, Vol. IX Pt. 1, January 1928. Accessed at Archive.org.
Sigmund Freud, Jokes and Their Relation to the Unconscious, translated and edited by James Strachey (New York: Norton, 1963).
Calvin Tomkins, Duchamp: A Biography (New York: Owl Books/Henry Holt & Co., 1996). Internal cites to Tomkins.
Paolo Virno, Multitude: Between Innovation and Negation, tr. Isabella Bertoletti, James Cascaito, and Andrea Casson (New York: Semiotext(e), 2008). Citations to page numbers only are to Virno.
Larry Witham, Picasso and the Chess Player: Pablo Picasso, Marcel Duchamp, and the Battle for the Soul of Modern Art (Lebanon, NH: U Press of New England, 2013). For a general discussion of Duchamp in terms of blague.
Slavoj Žižek, Did Somebody Say Totalitarianism?: Five Interventions in the (Mis)use of a Notion (London: Verso, 2002). Internal cite to Žižek.
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Daniel Barbiero is a double bassist, composer and writer in the Washington DC area. He writes on the art, music and literature of the classic avant-gardes of the 20th century and on contemporary work, and is the author of the essay collection As Within, So Without (Arteidolia Press, 2021).
Link to Daniel Barbiero’s, As Within, so Without →
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