If you spend enough time in the annals of art history, you’ll find something (or someone) to laugh at. Humor was central to Pieter Bruegel the Elder’s paintings of proverbs, which skewered human foibles and social pretensions. Eighteenth-century British caricaturists such as James Gillray and Thomas Rowlandson used satire to make sense of political turbulence, leaving behind indelible images of Napoleon as an absurdly diminutive general. By the 1830s, French caricaturist Honoré Daumier had so brutally mocked monarchs and political leaders that he was imprisoned for “inciting contempt of the government.”
