Crowd Pleasers

The scenes depicted in Crowd Pleasers are the banal scenes from everyday life, scenes of accidents, humiliation, and miraculous flukes which we can comfortably laugh at, as each one has been volunteered to the viewing public via national television by the participants. This comfortable humour of Australia’s Funniest home Videos allows us to witness painful real-life accidents and individual humiliation without concern or guilt, and even offers a kind of ‘compensation’ (prize money & fame)

In the spirit of classic cartoon slapstick with its stylised and aestheticized use of hurt gags, violent pratfalls, & amazing complicated syntax of character representation and behaviour that runs in perpetual motion free from recourse, this work explores not just the idea of how pervasive and irresistible slapstick comedy is, but also, to what extent this type of humour is the modern inoculum for a world that hovers between banality and hazardous unpredictability.