Being funny can save your ass from most situations in this life. Given how any art benefits from humour it’s a mystery why it isn’t deployed more. British artist David Shrigley has one of those blessed CVs dotted with everything from a Blur video to creating the world’s only successful dead-cat sculpture, yet he’s known mostly for his outsider-by-way-of-art school drawings and banal poems. 

Collected in all their scribbled glory in Ants Have Sex in Your Beer, the drawings’ combined effect is a literal reductio ad absurdum.  In one, entitled “I have glimpsed the future,” all clichés of tomorrow are distilled into wonky, foreshortened vector lines. His pages of poetic text reveal a stylist as structurally ambitious as Charles Olson but also as sincere as a 15-year-old mailing Xeroxed pages to Broken Pencil: “Bird / Flying low / In a sky filled with fluff / Fluff in its eyes / It collides with a chimney.”  It’s OK to laugh.

Despite the lack of fleshed out information, Shrigley’s tortured strokes and deadpan words can tell complete stories: “Upon my return from exile I enter the town riding a giant goose. The goose will peck the fuck out of any protestors.”  Don’t dismiss those words as just base jokes either; the cruel complexities of fame have never been so vividly captured as in “Gnome is / Amazed by you / Gnome will / Tell the other gnomes /Gnomes will come / To gawp at you / Your oratory / Will be severely affected.”

Shrigley’s too-cute brand may be poised for gallery gift shop domination, but so what? His illuminated letter page, “All architects are bastards,” sure as hell beats anything on a Keith Haring mug.

Canada’s Jordan Scott does peculiar and funny things to language as well. Scott’s poems and prose in Blert were, according to him, written to be as difficult as possible to read aloud. If you’re expecting million-dollar-word workouts, note that Scott has dealt with a stutter since childhood so, for the author, a word as benign as “mayonnaise” takes on a Herculean scale. To make it so for the reader as well, Scott breaks his line approximating his stutter, and not with hyphens and pauses but rather with syllabic rhythm and repetition: “gales lurk / berserk cortex / honeyed botox / globs boom of clavicles / cornsilk lips blitz / as Molotov blisters / Tupperware slur.” 

On one level it’s nonsense — in the best meaning of the word, and highly musical nonsense at that — but somewhere in Scott’s staccato compositions is also a story “Of my mouth and me. Of other people’s fluent mouths and me.”

Who knew the words “Foreman Grill” were so fecund with linguistic possibilities?

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