Let's play a quick association game. When you hear "classical art," do you immediately think "funny"? Probably not, unless you're a connoisseur of fine art or an art historian. But I'm here to tell you that there are plenty of funny classical (and I'm using the term loosely here) painters who didn't shy away from acting like silly little geese.
Today, artist Joseph Ducreaux is famous for his witty self-portraits. He couldn't have guessed it at the time, but they're the perfect format for memes nowadays. Ducreaux was fascinated with physiognomy, the concept that our outer appearance reflects our character. Experts call his portraits anachronistic; they date back to the 1800s, yet the expressions seem so modern.
French painter and sculptor Marcel Duchamp is another great artist who had a pretty prominent funny bone. The quote "Humor is the only reason to live" is attributed to Duchamp, and he embodied it with most of his works, from reworking existing masterpieces to putting trash in an art gallery.
His works like "Fountain" (a toilet bowl signed with the pseudonym 'foo') and "Mona Lisa Revisited" (Gioconda with a silly mustache on her upper lip) are some of the most famous examples of Duchamp trolling other artists, his audience, and the art world in general.
If you were to Google Salvador Dali right this moment, you'd see that most of the photographs we have depict him in silly poses and making some kind of face. That alone and his silly but majestic mustache should tell you a thing or two about his sense of humor. Apparently, he used to get out of paying a restaurant bill by doodling on the other side of the check. The owner would never dare to cash out a piece of paper that might be worth thousands, if not millions, someday.
Perhaps a lesser-known humorous painter is Pieter Brueghel the Elder. In 1559, he did a painting "Dutch Proverbs," where he literally depicted a collection of just that: Dutch proverbs. The painting includes a knight with a knife in his mouth representing the "To be armed to the teeth" proverb and him trying to put a bell on a cat (representing the saying "To bell a cat," meaning to be indiscreet about secret plans).
Jean-Leon Gerome also was into literal depictions of words on the canvas. His painting "Optician's Sign" used wordplay: the French word for "dog" is "chien," so, he made an optician's ad by depicting a dog with a monocle. Gerome's take on the verbal pun became an inspiration for surrealists many years later.
An attempt at a somewhat more subdued humor was Eugène Lepoittevin's "Approaching a Surprise" in 1852. In it, a reading priest is just about to turn a corner, but, unbeknownst to him, there's a pile of clothes clearly belonging to a woman who just stripped off to take a dip into the lake. And here's the suspense: will he raise his head from the book and see the surprise?
