Laughing In a Foreign Language

Fat people, falling over - it's funny, obviously, but is it art? Well, yes. Thanks to the Hayward Gallery, it is now. If you ever get irked trailing round sombre museums constantly being told 'Do not touch the lions' or 'Do not feed the Picassos' or whatever, then head to the Hayward Gallery from Friday.

Laughing in a Foreign Language presents a variety of work from 30 international artists and runs the whole gamut from slapstick to satire via a good bit of sarcasm and a mock interview with Osama Bin Laden. And, loads of the stuff is interactive, which is always pretty sweet.

One such work is American artist Doug Fishbone's clown-faced Joke Master Junior Joke Box 2. Push the clown's red nose and hear it crack one of 200 jokes. 'Did you hear about the dwarf psychic who escaped from prison?' runs one of the better ones. 'The newspaper headline read: Small Medium at Large.'

Of course, it's not all fun and games: this is Art, after all. The exhibition seeks to examine the differing roles that laughter plays in different societies and cultures across the world. Whilst in the UK, there's nothing better than a good pun, for artists such as Japan's Makoto Aida, humour is invariably intensely politicized. Julien Rosefeldt, meanwhile, goes absurd, with a circus clown scrambling about in the Brazilian rainforest, and proves, once and for all, that Germans do indeed have a sense of humour. The only drawback with the exhibition's approach is neglecting to examine how humour changes over time: nobody, for example, really laughs any more at Shakespeare's labored puns.

'Laughter is universal.... Humour, however, is socially specific.' Thus spoke the Director of the Hayward, the amusingly named Ralph Rugoff. Ever since the Earl of Shaftesbury prattled on about humour as a form of public sensibility in the late 1600s, numerous academic studies have sought to explain the purpose, role, and effect of laughter. Whether from a literary, artistic, political, linguistic, or evolutionary point of view, all of these studies are notable for one thing: they're just not very funny. What makes the Hayward's exhibition such a delight is the balance between interesting analyses of humour and stuff that'll simply make you laugh.