Game for a laugh | 17 July 2010

Rude Britannia: British Comic Art
Tate Britain, until 5 September

If each age gets the art it deserves, it might also be said that each age gets the exhibitions it deserves. The robust tradition of British Comic Art has never looked so unfunny and anaemic as it does in this current overworked examination at Tate Millbank. My visit coincided with some voluble OAPs up from the country, a know-it-all guide manqué and a couple of solemn Americans who were evidently seeking enlightenment as to the strange habits of this island race. There were sighs aplenty but I’d reached Room 3 before I heard a single laugh, and this response was directed (not surprisingly) at a video screen and headphones replaying old episodes of Spitting Image. The problem is that if humour has to be explained, it very often ceases to be funny. And nowadays, curators nearly always get wrong what should be explained and what shouldn’t.

The first room is supposed to function as an introduction to the subject, and in this role it mixes the historical with the contemporary — Hogarth with Klega, H.M. Bateman with Wenceslaus Hollar, Rowlandson with Glen Baxter and Leo Baxendale of the Beano. There are some fine things here, as well as some dull ones, but the audience closely resembled Thomas Patch’s ‘Gathering of Dilettanti in a Sculpture Hall’ — the common lack of interest was all too evident. I liked the juxtaposition of Carole Windham’s ceramic figure group ‘Obadiah, Mastrr of Bursley’ (2000), with its 19th-century Staffordshire bull-baiting prototype. (At least the little dog laughed.) And hanging Gillray next to Donald Parsnips’s Daily Journal news-stand was an inspired move. Then there’s the wonderfully unfunny ‘Laughing Parson’ (inevitably reading Punch) by Charles Spencelayh, and cabinets of illustrations by Leech and Tenniel.