About this magazine

What this magazine covers

Artful Jesters writes about humour in visual art: the painters, sculptors, cartoonists, photographers and ceramicists who build a joke into a picture, and the tradition that stands behind them. The magazine keeps four rooms. Artists profiles the visual jesters one at a time and asks what the work argues about. Humor in Art follows the long line of parody, irony, satire and absurdity from the medieval jester and the press caricature through Dada and Surrealism to the present. Studio treats comic creativity as a practice: exercises, constraints and classroom work that train the eye. Books reads the monographs, exhibition catalogues, histories and classroom resources that belong on the shelf.

Who writes it

The desk of Artful Jesters writes the entries. Each entry is dated when it is last checked, names the sources the desk read, and describes artists, museums, publishers and workshops in the third person. Where a claim rests on a catalogue, an archive or a published interview, the entry says which one.

How an entry is made

An entry begins with one question a reader actually asks: which feature a caricaturist chooses to exaggerate, why a joke in a photograph depends on timing rather than subject, how a museum shows a funny object without mocking it. The desk reads the sources, writes the answer first, then the sections a reader can jump to, then the sources at the foot of the page. Images are plates generated for the entry and captioned as plates.