Joke Trading draws on the verbal tradition of humour and the act of joke telling as a site of social exchange and leisure. “Joking is a specific and meaningful practice that the audience and the joke-teller recognise as such. There is a tacit social contract at work here, namely [an] agreement about the social world in which we find ourselves as the implicit background to the joke.”1 Over three nights, members of the public (people) will be invited to sit with the artist (also a person) and trade jokes until their heart is content. In the act of trading jokes – a kind of bartering – humour, and one’s stock of knowledge, becomes strangely monetised… layby now!
1. Critchley, Simon, ‘On Humour’, London: Routledge, 2002, p. 3.
