Unveiling

I never should have underestimated the complexity of humour and how hard it is to be funny.  Even after the lecture we had from a stand up comic, who said it was the easiest thing in the world, I should have know better, that he’s far too modest and making people laugh is difficult!

Freud says we laugh to rid our subconscious feelings of aggressions or our repressed feelings of sexual desire, like how we laugh at dirty jokes or the ones when someone gets hurt…

In any rate, I was intrigued by the relationship between humour and sex, and to the image of the body and the pornographic. It’s an interesting subject to me mostly because of the hysteria around it.  The whole idea of a part of the human body being pornographic - depending on context - and the taboo around sex, even the fascination with it and how that all changes depending on the culture of the gender of a person... Would people even be bothered with it if there wasn’t a social stigmatism around it? is it the whole thing with being naughty? Ok different subject, not going into that right now.

Here’s what I was thinking when my fellow student, Arlette and I, came up with the idea of the “unveiling project”… penises just aren’t funny. According to our lecturer he said you’ll always get a laugh if you talk about them, wanking or whatever, and he was right! We went to a stand up night and nearly every male comedian had some version of the word… and people laughed. I couldn’t understand it, but if juvenile humour is the way to go I thought if I made the biggest penis in the world people must find it hysterical.  I told Arlette the idea and she agreed carrying in a big sculpture and just leaving it standing in the middle of the room would be funny and suggested a giant paper mached cock would be guaranteed to get some laughs.  Don’t get me wrong, of course I had my doubts during construction about what people might think, but that’s the whole point!

That night I went to buy chicken wire, the next day glue, and we set to work. We were happy right away after we built the base structure out of the wire, but things didn’t go so well once we started gluing.  The weight of the wet paper was causing the sculpture to collapse... clever Arlette thought it best to lie it on its side, and then shoved a chair inside and sort of hoist ed up the middle with twine to the ceiling.  We also didn’t want anyone to see what we were building before the performance and so then decided to store it in the small office of the studio, which meant we had to go through the whole tying up procedure again. 



By the middle of the next day that proved to be an exercise in futility as the heat from the room not only prevented the paper mache to dry but all of the newspaper we taped to the the walls fell off and the sculpture was exposed!

We didn’t get to painting until the early morning of the day of the performance. Though painting was the easiest part of the construction and where the sculpture really came to life. We left it to dry and went to the studio to watch the beginning part of the performances. It was soon our turn and as Arlette and I were the only members from our group that decided to participate in this I started to get really nervous, not because the entire first to third year of graphics students would be watching, but what if they didn’t laugh!




Arlette thought it would be good to dress in security jackets with fake moustaches and I was up for the idea of being disguised. We could hardly carry the structure downstairs to the performance area as it was so large and unstable and not completely dried. We entered the room with this huge ten foot thing covered in a dirty dust sheet and took it to the centre of the room then up onto the top of a table... the problem was we couldn’t unveil it... we couldn’t get high enough to lift the dust sheet off. When we finally uncovered it the whole thing flopped over! I was too embarrassed to remember if anyone laughed or not and I’m pretty sure they didn’t , but seemed most likely terrified by the two perverts who created it!!!  
Click here to see the performance