Category Archives: humor

The grotesques of Arent van Bolten

Update 8/2//2014: there is a complete version incl. images at http://archive.is/XwhgQ

It’s been quite difficult to trace the provenance of the above print. It depicts two chimerical creatures, both with drooping breasts, watched over by three disembodied grotesque masks.

First, via Biomediale. Contemporary Society and Genomic Culture[1], a paper on chimaera phylogeny by Sven Drühl I found the unidentified print above. Searching some more, The Cabinet of the Solar Plexus[2] says that it is by Hendrick Goltzius.

However, the inexhaustable[3] Marinni contradicts this and attributed it to Arent van Bolten (c.1573 – c.1633)[4].

End of quest.

Two other favourites from that series include a grotesque holding a club spurning another grotesque[5] and two footed phalli stabbing each other while surrounded by two grotesque drooping masks that resemble an elongated scrotum [6], that last a real find for the metamorphic genitalia category.

Note the similarity to Les Songes Drolatiques[7] (1565) and the Varie Figuri Gobbi (1616, ‘Various Hunchbacked Figures’) by Jacques Callot.

PS. Europeana.eu has easy access to all of the prints[8].

RIP Mollie Sugden (1922 – 2009)

RIP Mollie Sugden, 86, British actress (Are You Being Served?).

Mrs. Slocombe at the hairdresser’s

Mary Isobel Sugden (21 July 1922 – 1 July 2009) was an British comedy actress, known as Mollie Sugden, who is best known for playing Mrs. Slocombe in the popular and long running British sitcom Are You Being Served? from 1972 to 1985.

Are You Being Served? rarely left the store, and to parody the stereotype of the British class system, characters rarely addressed each other by their given names, even after work.

Mrs. Slocombe was the Head of the Ladies Department in a department store. She frequently died her hair unusual colours such as lime green or orange. Mrs. Slocombe’s husband left her and she lived with her cat, Tiddles, which she referred to as “my pussy;” this was the source of many a double entendre, most of which Mrs. Slocombe herself completely misses. It is often suggested that when she was younger she had quite a wild life and possibly even worked in a bar.

At various times, Mrs. Slocombe has (often while drunk) tried to flirt unsuccessfully with various members of the male staff.

Never mind the bollocks, here’s Rabelais

RIP Stanley Chapman (1925 – 2009)

RIP Stanley Chapman (1925 – 2009)[1]

via www.tate.org.uk RIP Stanley Chapman (1925 - 2009) Fig.3 Stanley Chapman Cover illustration for Subsidia Pataphysica, no.1, 19 December 1965enlarge

via www.tate.org.uk

Cover illustration for Subsidia Pataphysica, no.1, 19 December 1965

Stanley Chapman (1925 – 2009) was a British architect, designer, translator and writer. His interests included theatre and pataphysics. He was involved with founding the National Theatre of London, was a member of Oulipo of the year 1960, founder of the Outrapo and a member also of the French Collège de ‘Pataphysique, president the London Institute of ‘Pataphysics and the Lewis Carroll Society. His English translation of Hundred Thousand Billion Poems was received with “admiring stupefaction” by Raymond Queneau.

Of a Fool, Who Thought His Wife Had Two Openings

Gian Francesco Poggio Bracciolini

I have a definite fondness for crude humour of the Middle Ages. The history of the genre was first documented in Italian scholar Poggio‘s Facetiae, a collection of humorous and indecent tales.

There is a presumably American 1930 private edition titled Facetia Erotica. Its full text can be found here.

It features such stories as Of a Fool, Who Thought His Wife Had Two Openings.

Poggio: Facetia Erotica, Title Page Poggio ‘s Facetiae, a collection of humorous and indecent tales is his best known work: it is available in several English translations. There is a public domain 1930 edition titled Facetia Erotica. It features such stories as Of a Fool, Who Thought His Wife Had Two Openings.

Facetiae, here published as Facetia Erotica. (source)

A peasant of our district, a stupid devil, who was utterly ignorant in matters of sex, got married. Thus it happened one night that his wife turned her back to him in bed, so that her buttocks rested in his lap. He had his weapon ready and landed by chance right in the goal. Marveling at his success, he inquired of his wife if she had two openings. And when she answered in the affirmative, he cried: “Hoho! I am content with but one; the second is entirely superfluous.” Upon which the sly woman, who was secretly consorting with the local priest, replied: “Then we can give the second away to charity. Let us grant it to the church and our priest.” The peasant, thinking to be relieved of an unnecessary burden, agreed [read the rest].

History of Caricature and Grotesque in Literature and Art by Thomas Wright, 1865

History of Caricature and Grotesque in Literature and Art by Thomas Wright, 1865

This volume is new to me, it has an interesting table of contents, there is a digitized version at Archive.org, but so poorly done it renders it as good as useless.

RIP Peter “Carry On” Rogers (1914 – 2009)

RIP Peter Rogers (1914 – 2009)

Carry On… Up the Khyber

Peter Rogers (20 February 1914 – 14 April 2009) was a British film producer. Rogers is best-known as producer of the Carry On series of British sex comedy films, beginning with Carry On Sergeant in 1958.

[Youtube=http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=lkqHI3-KXCs&]

“It sounds bizar but the Carry On films are as much part of the sixties as Pink Floyd” (documentary by the BBC, 2007).

The Carry On films were a long-running series of British low-budget comedy films, directed by Gerald Thomas and produced by Peter Rogers. An energetic mix of parody, farce, slapstick and double entendres, they are seen as classic examples of the low end of British humour in the British comic tradition of the music hall and seaside postcards, best documented in Keeping the British End Up: Four Decades of Saucy Cinema by Simon Sheridan.

French erotica, and, icon of erotic art #42

In the history of world erotica I present you with Le Poitevin’s diableries.

From the Les Diableries Erotiques by Eugène le Poitevin

Eugène le Poitevin (1806 – 1870) was a French artist, author of Les Diableries Erotiques.

He is an underrated figure in the history of French erotica and his engraving above from the aforementioned Les Diableries Erotiques is icon of erotic art #42.

Diableries are an interesting genre and illustrates how — before the “invention” of erotica and pornography — body parts and the people possessing them were used for subversive purposes, here as a form of satirical pornography or pornographic satire. The genre goes back to Rabelais, although his masterpiece Gargantua and Pantagruel was more emetic than erotic.

Gargantua and Pantagruel by François Rabelais, illustrated by Gustave Doré in 1873

Cardinal Armand de Rohan-Soubise by anonymous
Anonymous satirical caricature of the Cardinal Armand de Rohan-Soubise (1717-1757); this engraving is a good example of “pornography” as a tool for political subversion during France’s ancien régime.

Of course, artists such as Le Poitevin deserve a place in the history of derision, a playful and benign derision that is turned toward ourselves, toward the very core of human nature. As such it is also a piece of toilet philosophy.

Remarkably, the writeup on a Poitevin engraving not depicted here in my edition of Erotic Art of the Masters the 18th, 19th, 20th Centuries Art & Artists , author and editor Bradley Smith notes “penises and vaginas fly through the air like butterflies, are gathered in baskets and, personified, play games with adults and children.” This quote echoes the following by Deleuze and Guattari, “Flying anuses, speeding vaginas, there is no castration” (A Thousand Plateaus, p. 32).

Salute to Bacchus

Today is the feast of the Roman god Bacchus, known by the Greeks as the Greek god Dionysus. In my hometown Sint Niklaas, there used to be a bar called Bacchus. That was in the late seventies and early eighties.

I had to wait until the 1990s and the first issue of Wired Magazine to be properly introduced to Bacchus via Camille Paglia’s interview on her recently published Sexual Personae in which Paglia mentions the Nietzschean dichotomy of Apollonian and Dionysian.

Popular perceptions of Dionysus and Bacchus

Dionysus was seen as the god of everything uncivilized, of the innate wildness of humanity that the Athenians had tried to control. The Dionysia was probably a time to let out their inhibitions through highly emotional tragedies or irreverent comedies. During the pompe there was also an element of role-reversal – lower-class citizens could mock and jeer the upper classes, or women could insult their male relatives. This was known as aischrologia – αἰσχρολογία or tothasmos, a concept also found in the Eleusinian Mysteries.

Bacchus is less wel documented in text, but all the better in painting (Leonardo, Michelangelo, and Caravaggio). His name is connected with bacchanalia, a term in moderate usage today to indicate any drunken feast; drunken revels; as well as binges and orgies, whether literally or figuratively.

Rubens

Bacchanalia

The bacchanalia were wild and mystic festivals of the Roman and Greek god Bacchus. Introduced into Rome from lower Italy by way of Etruria (c. 200 BC), the bacchanalia were originally held in secret and only attended by women.

Bacchanalia by Auguste (Maurice François Giuslain) Léveque

The festivals occurred on three days of the year in a grove near the Aventine Hill, on March 16 and March 17. Later, admission to the rites was extended to men and celebrations took place five times a month. According to Livy, the extension happened in an era when the leader of the Bacchus cult was Paculla Annia.

Cornelis de Vos

Paculla Annia

Paculla Annia was a priestess from the southern Italy who, according to Livy, largely changed the rules of Bacchanalias so that regarding nothing as impious or forbidden became the very sum of Bacchus‘ cult. In the rites, men were said to have shrieked out prophecies in an altered state of consciousness with frenzied bodily convulsions. Women, dressed as Bacchantes, with hair dishevelled, would run down to the Tiber with burning torches, plunge them into the water, and take them out again. The rites gradually turned into sexual orgies, particularly among the men, and men who refused to take part were sacrificed. It is said these men were fastened to a machine and taken to hidden caves, where it was claimed they were kidnapped by the gods.

Prohibition by the Roman Senate

The festivities were reported to the Roman Senate which authorized a full investigation. In 186 BC, the Senate passed a strict law (the Senatus consultum de Bacchanalibus) prohibiting the Bacchanalia except under specific circumstances which required the approval of the Senate. Violators were to be executed.

Medi Holtrop wins the Grandville grand prize of “l’humour noir”

Plaisir (2008) – Medi Holtrop

In France, Norwegian artist Medi Holtrop and lifelong companion of Bernard Willem Holtrop received the 2009 Grandville grand prize of “l’humour noir.”

Via L’Alamblog [1]

I’ve previously written on the notion of humour noir, which translates into English as black comedy defined as a sub-genre of comedy and satire where topics and events that are usually treated seriously — death, mass murder, suicide, sickness, madness, terror, drug abuse, rape, war, etc. — are treated in a humorous or satirical manner. Synonyms include dark humor, morbid humor, gallows humor and off-color humor.

The French were the first to anthologize the genre in the seminal anthology Anthology of Black Humor (1940) by André Breton. Breton’s anthology not only introduced some until then almost unknown or forgotten writers, it also coined the term “black humor” (as Breton said, until then the term had meant nothing, unless someone imagined jokes about black people ). The term became globally used since then. The choice of authors was done entirely by Breton and according to his taste which he explains in the Foreword (called The Lightning Rod, a term suggested by Lichtenberg), a work of great depth that starts with contemplating Rimbaud´s words “Emanations, explosions.” from Rimbaud´s last poem The barrack-room of night : Dream.

In the United States, black comedy as a literary genre came to prominence in the 1950s and 1960s. Writers such as Terry Southern, Joseph Heller, Thomas Pynchon, Kurt Vonnegut and Harlan Ellison have published novels, stories and plays where profound or horrific events were portrayed in a comic manner. An anthology edited by Bruce Jay Friedman, titled Black Humor: Anthology was published in 1965.

I am currently researching the prevalence of black comedy in other parts of Europe.

Jahsonic

Burgemeester van Dodenstad