The Art World’s Lost Sense of Humour

“Explaining a joke is like dissecting a frog. You understand it better, but the frog dies in the process.” Truer words than these famous ones of E.B. White’s have rarely been spoken, and so requiring an explanation for jokes has long been, if not a strict taboo, then at least frowned upon for the way it ruins the fun. To not get it used to be a sign of an individual’s shortcomings, an admission of either dull-wittedness or hopeless disconnection from the zeitgeist where humour is born. But lately, the common wisdom about letting comedy or artworks or even facts speak for themselves has been subverted by a deepening fear of what might happen if something gets lost in translation.