Wayne Montecalvo, Flash, encaustic on paper on panel, 2006

Something funny's in the air. Is it because April Fool's Day kicks off the month? I don't know for sure, but there do seem to be a lot of exhibitions up now that hinge on humor—much of it rather dark.

This attitude seems pretty apt to the current state of the world—the practice of satire thrives when the state of things has gone somehow very wrong, and the "normal" morphs effortlessly into the absurd. Think of the list: the excruciatingly documented collapse of New Orleans through utter incompetence in the Katrina disaster, devolution of occupation into civil war in Iraq, the sudden realization that foreign companies run—and own—much of the US with the Dubai ports "scandal," and then Dick Cheney shoots a guy in the face—only to have the man go on TV to apologize to the veep for "putting him through all this." It's difficult for the comedy writers of " The Daily Show" and the Onion to push their satirical edge any further, as reality itself seems to constantly up the ante. I'm reminded of a line Lily Tomlin had back in another disastrous period of recent history, the post-Watergate, post-Vietnam, gas-shortage 70s: "I try to be cynical, but it's getting hard to keep up."

And so, perhaps, it should seem quite natural to see a variety of humorous approaches spring up in art, whether playful or dark or satirical or simply absurdist. There's just no margin in being earnest anymore. (And it's not nearly as fun!)

So we shouldn't be surprised to see a collaborative painting by KAKE (Ann Kalmbach and Tatana Kellner of Women's Studio Workshop) speculating on George W. Bush's next security move—protecting us from the bird flu by making a preemptive strike on the Canary Islands. Surrounded by a flock of garish yellow marshmallow Easter peeps, no less, lined up around the edges of the panel.

Frumess & Haskin, Commemorative Series, encaustic paints with customized labels, 1996-2006

This Dr. Strangelovesque piece appears in an exhibition titled "No Fooling: A Seriously Fun Encaustic Show" at the Art Society of Kingston, which R&F Paints exhibition director Laura Moriarty has curated to explore "a sense of curiosity, surprise, mischief, and fun—qualities often sorely lacking in today's ultraserious contemporary art world." What she has put together is a fascinatingly warped view of the world, a series of works in which we can see our reflection, as in a funhouse mirror.

Denise Orzo continues her recent series of textured encaustic paintings that focus on evil little girls, in which traditional images of innocence are imbued  with an almost seamy sense of experience. Similarly, there's something overtly playful about Rebecca Zilinski's deeply abstracted landscapes—observed bits of reality are converted into a dreamscape of odd shapes, strung along a meandering "ground line" that comes to function like a charm bracelet—but there's something vaguely dark and disturbing about the whole enterprise as well, as they cast an uncanny level of uncertainty on things that seem queerly familiar.

Richard Frumess, one of the owners of R&F, has created a special "commemorative series" of paints, relabeling colorful blocks of the encaustic that the firm manufactures with new names like "Better Dead Than Red—the color Reagan painted his enemies" or "John-John Brilliant," which bears the warning "Do not fly at night." (Ouch!) How is it that even "bad" jokes have the power to make us laugh?

Over at SUNY Ulster a one-person show of book-based works by Robert The plays with the conflicting registers of language and its mode(s) of representation. Taking the concept of the artist's book quite literally, The transforms hardcover books into works of sculpture, retaining their reference to language and subject matter along the way. He describes the process as "lovingly vandalizing" the books (many culled from dumpsters and thrift-store bins) "so they can assert themselves against the culture which turned them into debris."

Roberta Griffin, A New Game Begins, oil on board, 2006

The started making these objects about 15 years ago, and for a time made most of his living selling books that had been cut into the silhouette of guns in the East Village, where he then lived. The violence implicit in the process of cutting into the books is made literal by the subject matter—and yet, as mere representations of guns, they remain oddly impotent to inflict any true mayhem, inadvertently becoming objects of tragic humor.

Robert The, Desert Rose, Paper, Cardboard, Glue, 60 interlocking Bibles, 2005

A number of the guns appear in this installation, along with a number of pointed puns and plays on both the subject matter of the books, and on language itself. In American Heritage, The has constructed a hangman's noose, dangling from the ceiling, from what turns out to be the shredded contents of a dictionary. Who says words can't kill? And another striking piece, Desert Rose, seems to be a controversy waiting to happen—using 60 identical Bibles, he's cut identical oval holes through the center of the texts, making them into individual links in larger chains, concentrically arranged on a low pedestal. While it's not an inherently irreverent piece, I wonder how long it will be before someone decides to take exception to it, simply because he's cut into the Bibles to begin with.

The, who legally changed his surname because he "wanted to be an article, and not a proper noun," is so troubled by the conundrum of mediation through language that he worries constantly about how his work is "read," without realizing the pun contained in his concern. The work itself is marked by his ambivalent, deeply suspicious attitude toward the whole project of language and representation—a jungle of signs that we have little chance of escaping, even with un-Googleable last names.

Just in over the transom is word of another show with a sense of play, at Gallery 384 in Catskill. Kingston-based Roberta Griffin will be showing a series of recent  large-scale landscapes that riff on classics of the Hudson River School. Employing the style and compositions of artists like Frederic Church, Thomas Cole, and Jasper Cropsey, Griffin depicts contemporary events, from post-Katrina destruction in New Orleans to the smoldering ashes of post-9/11 New York, raising "questions about the Romantic Sublime and its relationship to overwhelming tragedy." Yet, from the press release and invitation card (all I have to go on at press time), there seems to be more than a little gallows humor involved in the project, confirming the sentiments that I began the column with this month.