Carrie Mae Weems

In Ain't Jokin' (1987-88) Carrie Mae Weems tells a series of crude visual and verbal jokes based on racial stereotypes that aren't funny. In telling these jokes she is subverting the tendentious joke that depends for its effect upon the differences in the hearers' reactions. "Generally speaking, a tendentious joke calls for three people: in addition to the one who makes the joke, there must be a second who is taken as the object of hostile or sexual aggressiveness and a third in whom the joke's aim of producing pleasure is fulfilled" (Freud). By telling the joke herself, she removes herself from the role of object of the joke and is able to redirect the hostility.

About the Artist:
Carrie Mae Weems was born in 1953 in Portland, Oregon. She received a B.A. from the California Institute of the Arts and an M.F.A. from the University of California at San Diego. In 1994 she received the Louis Comfort Tiffany award. Her work was exhibited in the Project Room of the Museum of Modern Art in November 1995. She now lives in Brooklyn, NY.

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