Poczucie humoru w sztuce
Sense of humor in art

Summary/Abstract: „Thank God I’m an atheist” – this was the last gasp of a dying Louis Buñuel. Culture is like a spider web of tubes and wires that are wrapped around modern art museum – the Beaubourg Centre, the Centre Pompidou in central Paris. Art is one of the tangle of tubes and wires. If we sail under the clouds of knowledge surrounding our planet, we see that by clicking on the slogan ‘humor in art’, we can easily run into long lines of virtual statements by renown suppliers of humorous -witty-funny expressions – by Mark Twain, Oscar Wilde, Woody Allen and many others. Sense of humor in art manifests itself in many ways, and in particular those that subtly but firmly make us reflect on ourselves and make us more mentally healthy. Hugo Steinhaus, for example, answered the question in his pass-port form in communist-run Poland: ‘Did you, citizen, travel abroad? No, but the border twice changed about myself’. It is an example of slapstick humor, although it is connected with not so funny a situa-tion in the People’s Republic of Poland which lasted almost half a century, from 1944 to 1989. When Joanna Szczepkowska publicly said on TV that ‘as a result of free elections, communism ended in Poland’, it was considered as funny and true a statement; so it was not simply a joke.

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