Divisions of joy and comedy

Abstract

NUREMBERG/VIENNA: “Don’t tell my mother that I work in an advertising agency. She thinks I play the piano in a whorehouse.” This infamous quote from French creative
director Jacques Sequela represents something almost unheard of in the advertising and design business: a decisive sense of self-deprecation.
Of course, advertising in general is rarely a dreary subject — in fact, a humorous element here or there is often considered a welcome stylistic device in consumer
communications. Yet the people behind the laughs tend to
take themselves and their profession extremely seriously.
Nonetheless, there are signs that the trend is changing. It
wouldn’t be the first time that the so-called “applied arts” follow in the footsteps of pioneering movements
such as Dada, Fluxus, conceptual art and the like.
“Privately, insiders have been whispering for quite some
time that humor will be THE next big thing in design,” the editors of +rosebud magazine explain.
“We’re going to find out if there is anything to that.” The
creative team behind the internationally award-winning magazine has decided to dedicate the upcoming issue of +rosebud exclusively to any and all senses of humor.
“To regain our balance after the experience of making IDEAL, the last issue of +rosebud, we seriously
needed to lighten up,” the editors explain. The decision to
explore the various facets of humor came naturally as a result. “Especially when the going gets tough, the only way to deal with life is by simply not taking it seriously.”
But the magazine’s editors
aren’t interested in just plain old
fun alone. It wouldn’t be +rosebud
if they weren’t also searching
for deeper meaning in these
shallow waters.
Humor shares its ambivalence,
its ability to shift between
the utopian and the destructive
as well as its refusal of absolute
values with many of those twentieth-
century movements that continue
to exert an influence on society
today.

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