Design byHugh Aldersey-Williams
It's fatal to try to analyse humour, as anybody who remembers Howard Jacobson's television series on the subject will know. So what can one say to honour great humorists?
The question is of the moment. Two graphic wits died this month. Saul Steinberg you probably know. Tibor Kalman you perhaps don't. There are similarities in their work. Steinberg's cartoons played in the gap between inadequate words and superabundant meaning. My favourite was one called "Country Noises", which represented the sound of lawn-mowers, woodpeckers and paper quietly uncrumpling in the wastebasket by a series of dingbats and pattern-book examples.
Kalman ran an influential New York design studio called M&Co from the early 1980s until his death from cancer at the age of 49, with a break of several years in Italy where he edited the Benetton magazine Colors. Trained as a journalist and no artist himself, he made it his mission to bring ugliness and unseriousness to a business that all too often prides itself on the bland good taste and banality of content it can achieve for its clients.
Kalman knew it was stupid to dissect a joke, and it was rare that he would say anything profound about his own work. He enjoyed profanity. He would be amused at the pompousness of some his obituaries. When the American Institute of Graphic Arts (AIGA) decided to hold a humour show - the title is a guide to how funny it must have been - his poster to advertise the event satirised the po-faced perfectionism of the trade. M&Co's ostensible design was simply the words "AIGA Humor Show" with a banana skin on a white ground below it - the sort of poster Pentagram might have produced, elegant, not funny. The twist was printing the thing way off-register, revealing the margins, together with the designer's instruction to "watch the trim on this job - it's for the AIGA".
It takes perfectionism to get this kind of design just exactly not quite right. Kalman was demanding to work with and exhausting to be with - when he came to dinner, he poured our cheap wine down the sink and confided to us that his name derived from that of Emperor Tiberius, and was forgiven for both. His wife Maira played a vital role in developing both his career and his offbeat style, before producing her own successful series of children's books. (It is assumed she is the M of M&Co, although this was never stated.) They named their first child Lulu Bodoni, after a favourite typeface; the second, Alex, was given the name of a favourite associate. New York is now littered with design companies led by people who cut their teeth at M&Co.
M&Co did more or less forgettable work for property developers and corporate giants like IBM and used the income to do what they wanted - album covers for David Byrne and Laurie Anderson and film titles for Jonathan Demme. A sleeve for the Talking Heads single "Crosseyed and Painless" was styled to resemble a medical label - this was when Damien Hirst was doing O-levels. They began to manufacture watches with Dadaesque faces. One, rapidly acquired by the Museum of Modern Art in New York, had only the digits 10, 1 and 4 on its face; another had numbers in random order; another simply had a drawing of a chair at the 12 o'clock position - Swatch watches for intellectuals.
Most design companies try to impress at Christmas time with clever cards, but M&Co sent lavish, intelligent and challenging gifts - a steel rule engraved with metrological trivia, the dictionary I still use daily, with endpapers containing hilariously misunderstood captioned illustrations. Then one year it was a nondescript book interleaved with increasing denominations of dollar bills and a choice of envelopes addressed to various charities - the final decision was up to you.
Some designers think images can change the world. Kalman never said that, but he did begin to test the idea. In a competition to create a poster to mark the bicentenary of the French revolution, he reached straight for the jugular. His poster projected the words of the 35th and final article of the Declaration of the Rights of Man upon the face of an African woman. The words refer to the right to resort to force when other means of upholding the foregoing rights fail. Along with a poster by an Australian designer, proclaiming the rights of the indigenous peoples of the French Pacific islands, it was nearly banned. The organisers clearly didn't want to start a revolution.
Colors could have been the ultimate vehicle for the politicised opinions that were always in a man who had fled Hungary in 1956 and been a university student in 1968. But the magazine was never quite what one hoped it might be. Although it brought his indignation to a far wider audience, Kalman had trouble with the Roman work ethic and with Benetton's art director, Oliviero Toscani.
The magazine "about the rest of the world" was nothing of the sort. It was a campaign sheet for secular western liberal values. The "shocking" newborn baby on the cover of the first issue was, after all, held safely in arms sleeved in surgeon's green. The magazine briefly achieved tabloid notoriety in Britain when Kalman blacked the Queen's face (he also bleached Spike Lee's). There was a graphic proposal for a condom-shaped monument in St Peter's Square. The suggestion that the idea might offend a chunk of Colors' readership was met with a characteristically diplomatic double entendre: "Well, fuck them."
Another M&Co Christmas gift was a bar of soap, engraved with the word "Truth", in a metal box with the legend: "Basta nostalgia." It came with a bottle of perfume called "Optimism". I'm saving them for the millennium Kalman didn't live to see.
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