When the City Decides to Be Funny
I’ve been a fan of street photography for years, and like most photographers, I have a list of practitioners whose work I particularly admire. One of my favourites is Elliott Erwitt, partly because he was very fond of dogs, which appeals to me as a retired veterinarian. Another reason is his wonderful sense of humour.
Perhaps his most famous example is a photograph of a person sitting on the front steps of a building with a bulldog on their lap. The dog’s fur blends seamlessly with the person’s clothing, and its head is perfectly aligned over the person’s face, creating the appearance of a canine-human hybrid. The dog’s expression is priceless. Erwitt held humour in high regard, once saying that “making people laugh is one of the highest achievements you can have. And when you can make them laugh and cry, alternately, like Chaplin does, now that’s the highest of all possible achievements. I don’t know that I aim for it, but I recognize it as the supreme goal.”
Other street photographers have long embraced humour as a central element of their work. Martin Parr, for example, often finds wit in the surreal, the kitschy, and the subtly ironic. Matt Stuart, by contrast, shoots with a kind of relentless attentiveness, reading the street so well that he seems able to anticipate the moment just before something amusing unfolds. In his book A Street Photography Manifesto, veteran street photographer Brian Lloyd Duckett (a frequent contributor to KLICK) openly acknowledges his fondness for humour in the genre. Many of his most memorable images reflect that sensibility, capturing those fleeting, slightly absurd moments that reward both patience and a sharp eye.
Humour softens street photography, which is often associated with grit, loneliness, or tension. While I’m certainly drawn to those elements as well, the humourous moments I occasionally capture remind me that city life is also filled with small absurdities and unexpected delights.
Finding humourous situations to photograph is much harder than it might appear. It requires patience, luck, and above all, awareness. Humour is, by its very nature, unexpected and out of the ordinary. Street photography captures fleeting moments, and humourous situations tend to be the most fleeting of all. Life is filled with unintentionally comical moments. The photographer’s job isn’t to create the joke, but to recognize when the world briefly arranges itself into something absurd, and to be ready to pounce when it happens.
Exactly what makes something funny has always been difficult to define. Jokes tend to fall apart when they’re deconstructed. What one person finds hilarious, witty, or clever might leave someone else perplexed or unmoved. In my own street photographs, the humour often comes from things like impeccable timing, clever juxtapositions, witty signage, or striking facial expressions.
Animals also appear frequently in my humourous images, perhaps because they provoke laughter without ever intending to. Dogs in particular seem to have a knack for inserting themselves into strange situations, often without the slightest awareness of how funny they look.
Here are a few examples of the kinds of humourous moments that occasionally present themselves if you keep your eyes open. The city, it turns out, has a pretty good sense of humour.
