Just a little yolk, fuck em’ if they can’t take a joke.
—Bette Midler, Comic Relief
Comedy is one of the most useful strategies to undermine sexists, racists, and hegemony in general. Simply put, laughter is pleasure, pleasure incites empathy, and empathy incites change. Tammy Rae Carland’s Funny Face I Love You postulates on this subversive imaginary—female comedians shredding through the indignities, reorganizing their bodies, brains, and vulnerabilities until they’re recognizably funny. Once recognition has been established, the audience can forge an imaginary bridge between the punch line and the body up on stage, the threat.
A foundation for Carland’s project was the link between Roland Barthes’ punctum—that elusive traumatic element that allows certain photographs to relate rather than just represent—and the punch line, the zinger that connects a joke to a more complicated narrative. This punctum/punch line wordplay highlights the wound central to each etymology: in the former a Biblical wound that made Christ human, in the latter an ultimate provocation that is equivalent to a punch.
Carland’s photographs are drenched in black, the curtain swallowing context and making the lit subject float, whether it’s a comedian caught mid-act, her legs in the air, or an empty stool, a mic, and a bottle of water. These floating baroque stages are filled with the evidence of performance, but the comedian’s face is always obscured, withholding the expression that contains the joke. Instead, the punch lines of famous female comedic acts from the ’60s and ’70s are typed out poetically and framed nearby in a written accompaniment. Filling in for the obscured faces of contemporary comedians in the photographs, they bridge the imaginary gap between the funny joke and the funny face.
I'm Dying Up Here, #6 (wood suit). Color photograph, 30x40 in. Courtesy of the Artist and Silverman Gallery, San Francisco.
Leveraging the misogyny of power with this power of authorship, Carland draws from the routines of Moms Mabley, Bette Midler, Phyllis Diller, and Joan Rivers—legacies that informed and allowed the careers of Richard Pryor and Lenny Bruce; she applies them to outrageous bodily presences such as Tara Jepsen and Porchlight/NPR storyteller Beth Lisick. Listening to my recordings of Moms Mabley, I am floored by the terror of living as a black lesbian during the early-mid twentieth century. The excess of that experience must have transferred to the defiance allowed by her stage persona—her self-effacement allowing the impossible to be said and to be re-embodied by the traumatic possibilities of the punch line.
Funny Face I Love You arrives at a crucial moment in the photographic crisis; there is an excess of creative imagery right now, so much so that we require aggregators to help sort through the madness. Yet projects like Carland’s document the historical affect of an aesthetic transition, from the punctum’s wounded mourning to the punch line’s stab of defiance.
