‘That joke isn’t funny anymore’, said The Smiths, but no one seems to have told Richard Prince. The latest show by the perennially naughty, endlessly appropriative American artist is just the same handful of jokes scrawled over and over in thick oil stick on canvas.
All the jokes are nicked from classic Jewish American comedian Rodney Dangerfield. ‘Just my luck, I was at the airport when my ship came in’ appears the most. Like the best Dangerfield gags, it’s quick and immediate, but also hugely self-deprecating and steeped in deep, painful, tangible sadness. ‘When I read about the evils of drink I gave up reading’ speaks of the misery of alcoholism, ‘I never had a penny to my name so I changed my name’ hints at poverty and misfortune. They’re perfect jokes that are also incredibly miserable.
Prince paints the words thickly across canvases plastered with Dangerfield’s own hectic, stream of consciousness notes. You can see the joke being reworked again and again before materialising into its final form. It’s intense, overbearing, almost psychotic.
By repeating the jokes endlessly in his frantic scrawl, Prince does two equal and opposite things. Firstly, he amps up and exaggerates their meaning, pushing the misery, humour and word play to an extreme by making you think about them in all their detail. The alcoholism, misery and poverty are all heightened, so is the basic premise of each joke.
Secondly, and at the same time, he totally obliterates all that meaning. Eventually, it all gets repeated so many times it just falls apart and stops making sense. The lettering just becomes symbols, the words become a mush.
Like everything with Prince, it’s both brilliant and terrible, a great idea and a dumb thieving one. It operates in Richard Prince-only territory that manages to be genius and idiocy at the same time. These are obsessive, complex, layered works that are also lazy and stupid paintings of someone else’s jokes. Brilliant, in other words.
