Introduction:Read This Sitting Down Jonathan P. Eburne (bio) Back in 2013, when Amy Elias and I sat down to discuss the possibility of founding a scholarly journal for the Association for the Study of the Arts of the Present—we were on the phone; "sit down," she said. "I want to talk to you about starting a journal together"—I raised the notion of publishing a humor issue. "Oh," Amy said. Amy had been sketching out her vision for the journal's inaugural issue, a brilliant collective meditation on Art and the Commons (Volume 1, No. 1). Then I introduced the possibility of the special issue I am introducing to you now. The ensuing pause in the conversation felt uncommonly long. I grew anxious that Amy, who had invested so much of her time and intellectual energy into establishing ASAP as a major scholarly organization, might have thought that I was joking—or, worse, that I was, myself, a joke. "No, wait," I said. "I'm serious." "OK," she noted. "Sure. A special issue on comedy. That makes sense." "Ah," I continued, "Well, no, that's not really what I mean. I'm not talking about a special issue about comedy. I'm talking about a humor issue, an opportunity for people to write things in funny ways, as a kind of experiment." "Oh," she said again. As I sit here at my computer composing these lines—my final editorial assignment for ASAP/Journal; I've done a lot of sitting over the past seven years, as editors do—I arrive at an impasse. In reality, Amy Elias expressed nothing other [End Page 455] than enthusiasm toward the idea of a humor issue of ASAP/Journal. She, like me, considered it a vehicle for opening up ways to experiment with scholarly voice and form, and as a way to explore arts criticism meaningfully through an expanded set of genres and mediums, whether comix, graphic criticism, or performance. She was not underwhelmed, nor was she even skeptical. I've made this all up. But it's nonetheless tempting to tell the story this way, as the dull thud of a lead idea-balloon striking the ground. Why is this so? For one, its misprision manages to register the inflated ambitions of the project, however ironically: it casts the prospect of writing humorous arts criticism as an idea so outlandish, so rashly imaginative as to be unimaginable. On the flip side there is also, simply, fatigue. Oh, one of those. There's a filament of truth in each of these considerations. The demands of contemporary scholarship have become familiar to the point of mortification—not to mention the demands faced by contemporary scholars, artists, and institutions of higher education today, particularly precariously employed and queer, trans, and BIPOC artists and scholars. Scholarly writing, no less than artistic practice or grantwriting, is an exercise in prestige and survival, as much as an instrument of creative thinking and the communication of new ideas. Who can afford to play games? All the same, what might it mean to make such writing funny? Is this a good thing or a bad thing? Is it a thing at all? In the pages of this special issue you will encounter a rich mosaic of writing and image that explores the affordances of humor as a mode of critical reflection in and on the contemporary arts. Very little of it is salacious or crude, although there is the occasional dick joke here and there, particularly in Allison Harris's essay on "Cocksman Charisma," or, depending on your optic, in Aurélie Matheron's playfully Marxian assessment of Maurizio Cattelan's banana. At the same time, it's a given that a certain number of the jokes will fall flat, especially here in the introduction. I can assure you: humor isn't easy. As Cathy Park Hong notes in a recent essay on Richard Pryor's stand-up, it's virtually impossible to bullshit one's way through comedy, "because the audience cannot be convinced into laughter."1 [End Page 456] The prospect of integrating humor with argumentative critical prose thus faces, at best, an aporia—and at worst...