“Funny Business: Photography and Humor” presents 70 photographs that showcase the mechanics of photographic humor, while examining the reasons for which artists have employed it as a strategy in their work. The photographs have mainly been drawn from the collection of the Center for Creative Photography (CCP) at the University of Arizona in Tucson, with whom the Phoenix Art Museum has a unique partnership. A few have come from other institutions, some private collections, and some have been lent directly from the artist themselves.
Spanning nearly the entire history of the medium, “Funny Business” offers a compelling view into the ways artists have utilized visual humor not only to provoke laughter and delight, but also as a means of resistance, an antidote to the heaviness of the world, and a way to interrogate and subvert norms and hierarchies.
The exhibition features wide-ranging examples of photographic humor that invoke a variety of comedic modes, including slapstick, irony, absurdism, satire, self-deprecation, and parody. Featured works include vernacular snapshots, mid-century street photography, tongue-in-cheek 1970s conceptual imagery, and contemporary works.
Photographers whose work is on view in the exhibition include John Baldessari, Helen Levitt, William Wegman, Lisette Model, Jeff Mermelstein, and Tseng Kwong Chi, along with many others.
“I’ve wanted to do a show about photographic humor for years and am delighted to bring this idea to life as my first original exhibition for Phoenix Art Museum,” says Emilia Mickevicius, the Norton Family Assistant Curator of Photography at Phoenix Art Museum and the Center for Creative Photography. “It really grew out of a mix of research and personal interests: I am broadly fascinated by what happens in our minds when we look at photographs – how we read and respond to them – and became really interested in this question of why certain pictures register as funny to us.”
The exhibition is broken down into 4 thematic sections. The first, titled “All the World’s a Stage,” highlights slapstick and observational comedy. The 2nd is “Inside Jokes,” which highlights photographers’ adoption of a tongue-in-cheek attitude toward their predecessors and the conventions of photography itself. The 3rd is titled “Context is Everything,” and explores how subjects and photographic images can become absurd, ironic, and nonsensical when shown outside of their original contexts or in unexpected juxtaposition with one another. And finally, there is “Comic Relief,” which features the work of contemporary artists who use humor in a critical or subversive manner to explore issues of identity and belonging, politics, and general dimensions of contemporary life.
“The sections really fell into place as broad, roughly chronological containers that could help contextualize the material and humor types featured within them,” Mickevicius explains. “For example, the early snapshots and street photography became ‘All the World’s a Stage’ because they fell under this umbrella of imagery that involved instinct, chance, and being open to the drama of one’s everyday surroundings. ‘Inside Jokes’ cohered as a way to classify all this wacky 1970s material that is more cerebral in orientation and pokes fun at the medium itself.”
In the exhibition, photographers frame the world around them the same way they created the jokes and humor within their work. Garry Winogrand, whose photographs are also included in the exhibition, is credited as saying: “In the end, maybe the correct language would be how the fact of putting four edges around a collection of information or facts transforms it. A photograph is not what was photographed, it’s something else.” And he was right.
“The dynamic he’s alluding to in the quote is absolutely apparent there, and it’s something I explore in the texts – this notion that by isolating and prolonging a moment for our scrutiny, a photographer can put elements of their visual field – people, objects, etc. – into relation with one another in a way that is ironic, absurd, or even just striking or poignant,” tells Mickevicius. “I liken street photography to observational comedy as well as improv because they have a few key elements in common, like the embrace of chance as a creative principle and the ability to function as social commentary.”
The exhibition opens during a time of the rather unfunny polarization of the American populace along political party lines. This has led to more animosity, hatred and distrust rather than jokes and good humor between people. Mickevicius realized when she was planning the exhibition and selecting work for it that it would be opening in a much different political climate than the one in which she was doing the planning.
“The final gallery of the exhibition in particular features contemporary artists who are using humor to challenge hierarchies, stereotypes, and even oppressive political regimes around the globe,” she says. “Collectively, their work exemplifies how art can help us really see one another and imagine how else the world could be – and humor is central to how they all pursue that. It’s anything but frivolous.”
Photography has always been a powerful tool to tell stories about the world around us. Documentary photographers have used their work to deal with very heavy subject matter to show the world some of the darker aspects of humanity from poverty, to war, to racism. It does not hint at the subject but rather shows it directly. The work can be seen as the opposite of humor and jokes and lightness.
Humor also has the ability to confront the same subjects and be used as a tool to highlight inequities, criticize power dynamics, and fight stereotypes. It just engages the viewer through a different vision, but one that can be equally as powerful. It works not through directness, but rather through its obliqueness and engages the viewer’s mind in a more active way by forcing them to think deeper about what is in the frame and the meaning behind it.
“Both humor and photography are very powerful, meaningful forms of response to the reality that joy and suffering, triumph and tragedy, will always be happening everywhere simultaneously in our often cruel, yet beautiful world,” Mickevicius explains. “As forms of expression and communication, they each have the capacity to bear witness to that reality and function as a prism through which we individually and collectively consider it and keep going on in the face of it.” And in complicated times, a bit of laughter, and subversion, maybe just what we all need.
“Funny Business: Photography and Humor” is open at the Phoenix Art Museum from June 14, 2025 through January 4, 2026.
