As I sit at my desk, worried, my sinuses throbbing, I am thinking of the debt I owe to my former teacher, David Robbins.

I’m about to make four new episodes of an internet show I do called “Welcome to my Study.” It’s probably the most popular thing I’ve ever done. And it’s essentially a rip-off of David Robbins’ ideas. Dyna Moe contributed much to the show’s esthetic, but what I brought was totally cribbed from David.

Early on, David thought it might be a good idea to make jokes using a set of rules derived from conceptual art practices. He looked around and it seemed as if Andy Kaufman was already doing this. And maybe Letterman was kind of doing it. But it also seemed as if Martin Kippenberger was doing it too. And Piero Manzoni. Maybe Yves Klein.

If you were going to make jokes within an art context, you didn’t want to make “joke” jokes, because “joke” jokes were too ingratiating. Or maybe they were too caught up with traditional narrative, maybe too immersive. There’s a strain of Modernism (and by extension, Conceptual Art) that is skeptical of illusionism. Illusionism is creating something that’s not really there, a meta-world rather than something that’s physically in the here and now. It’s a pain in the ass because you can be fooled with illusionism into thinking something is good when it’s actually a piece of dump. Maybe you’re looking at a Bouguereau painting and you start thinking “wow, that peasant girl has flawless skin” or something, not realizing that the painting is actually garbage. You’ve been duped. The same thing happens sometimes with traditional standup comedy; a comedian will tell a hammy story that’s obviously not based on any real experience and for some reason you’ll start laughing even though you know the joke is pretty terrible. It’s the narrative form in general and the structure of the joke in particular that made you laugh. You’ve been duped, you fool!

So jokes can fool you. “Maybe,” thought David Robbins, “I could make ‘jokes’ instead.”

So the class I took in graduate school called “Concrete Comedy” showed us how to make “jokes.” Most of the time these jokes took the form of an object: you presented some object you made to the class and you checked to see if anyone thought it was funny. But remember: the objects weren’t supposed to be funny, they were supposed to be “funny.” And if they were good, they ended up being funny. Without the quotes. Just funny.

And that’s what “Welcome to my Study” is to me: presenting objects that are “funny” and, by extension, funny.

I hope these four new episodes turn out well. If not, I apologize in advance to all the people who liked the eight episodes (and one Christmas special) we did for the internet. These next ones are a bit beyond my control. They are meant for the HBO series, Funny or Die Presents. We will see. We will see.

This entry was posted on Monday, May 17th, 2010 at 4:53 pm and is filed under Uncategorized.