Laughing Matter

Can a building be funny? According to contributing author and editor Michela Rosso and the essayists assembled for Laughing at Architecture, the answer is clearly “yes”—although essential to perceiving the butt of any kind of joke, understanding context counts for a lot. The choice of image for the volume’s cover is apropos: an eighteenth-century illustration of London’s fashionable elite mounting the vertiginously steep staircase to the Royal Academy at Somerset House on their way to see the new art season’s collection of paintings. (Visitors to the Courtauld Institute Gallery today can stumble in their footsteps.) The winding stair at Somerset House—barely reconciling an elegant half-circular plan with the functional requirement of access to multiple levels of the building—must have been as challenging for the architect William Chambers to detail as it was for his patrons to negotiate in person. In the illustration, the art-goers appear falling, head-over-heels, crinolines and fleshy backsides exposed to public view, a satirical slant on salon exhibitionism. Of course, the joke is not about just any old stair, designer or occasion. Rather, the scene relies on context for its comedy, on several forms of insider knowledge—of architectural history, construction, culture and custom, to name a few—although one wouldn’t say the drawing is an “inside joke” per se. Rosso introduces the volume, citing contributions to her longstanding interest in the relationship between architecture and humour that evolved from earlier research on parody and the historiography of English modernism. Rosso’s encounter with rare comic almanacs of London’s Great Exhibition in 1851 at the Yale Centre for British Art in New Haven was particularly formative in the development of interests she addresses throughout this volume. Likewise, period caricatures by William Hogarth and George Cruikshank that came before and after the Exhibition, and additional, lesser-known historical documents, as well as insightful, but generally limited contemporary scholarship on the subject all suggested to Rosso there was a major caesura for research to fill. Each essay explores this in more or less chronological order, while each is able to stand alone and address contextual matters in sufficient detail. Rosso and her contributors largely forego obtuse speculation on the philosophical or psychological reasons for joke-telling (over to Bergson and Freud). The essays, therefore, largely proceed without a general account of humour and its relationship to architecture (reception theory gets short shrift—nothing funny there), with Rosso observing early on that: