Wilfried Lentz Rotterdam

Continuing his interest in “experimental comedy”, Michael Portnoy introduces the public to a specialized form of jokes, “carrot jokes”, through a series of interactive wall-based works.

His recent exploration of this genre was first proposed by cognitive linguists Chlopicki and Petray (1981). One of the primary features of these jokes is that their background has essentially occluded the foreground, i.e. all of the establishing features of the situation of a joke (setting, character, theme, style, etc.) have overcrowded the “room”, leaving little space for the narrative to nudge through. In the wall-based pieces,various carrot jokes are depicted through an audio recording of Portnoy reciting or discussing these convoluted texts.