An image can make you laugh without containing a single word. That sounds obvious until you ask how it happens, and then it turns out that the joke in an image is a small neurochemical mishap: something seems to fit together, then suddenly it doesn’t, and the brain has to quickly decide whether it is dangerous or funny. That is why a humorous poster is one of the most demanding images to hang on a wall. It has to stay just on the right side of the line, day after day. In this article, we review what humor research has actually shown about images, from Paolo Bonaiuto’s model to a brain study with thirty participants and caricatures, and translate it into practical choices for anyone who wants a poster that makes guests smile.
Quick facts: Paolo Bonaiuto published his model of the humorous experience in 2006 in the journal Empirical Studies of the Arts (volume 24, pages 3–41). A 2017 EEG study in Social Cognitive and Affective Neuroscience measured brain activity in 30 participants using 64 electrodes as they looked at caricatures. Art researcher Philip Welding at Leeds Arts University published an essay on humor, risk-taking, and still images in the journal Societies on February 26, 2024.
Bonaiuto’s model: why a visual joke requires both conflict and distance
The Italian psychologist Paolo Bonaiuto devoted a long article to a question most art historians leave aside: what happens in the viewer when an image is funny? His answer, which he presented in 2006, is that humor never arises from a single device. First, the image must be legible, so the viewer can fill in what is missing using their own experience. Then there must be a contradiction, an expected pattern that is broken, or a conflict between two things that do not belong together. And finally, the viewer must be able to keep the conflict at a distance. Bonaiuto describes it as a tug-of-war between being drawn to the conflict and wanting to protect oneself from it. Laughter comes only when protection wins.
What matters for anyone choosing wall art is his observation about shape and color. According to the article summary, rounded, stylized shapes, rather than angular, highly detailed ones, help the viewer avoid getting lost in the conflict. The same goes for playful, calming colors instead of loud, serious ones. In other words, the same contradiction can be funny or unpleasant depending on how the image is drawn. An elephant standing on tiptoe on a wire is funnier with soft outlines and warm tones than in sharp realism and dark lighting.
Bonaiuto also draws a conclusion about the artists themselves. Humor is common in art, he writes, partly because artists and their audiences tend to tolerate conflict and incongruity better than others. He cites Leonardo, Michelangelo, Picasso, and Magritte, and argues that they often used the ingredients of humor intuitively rather than consciously. Note that here we are relying on the article’s summary. The full article itself is behind a paywall, so we are not recounting the details of his experiment.
"The same contradiction can be funny or unsettling - the difference lies in how softly the image is drawn."
Thirty brains and a caricature: what the 2017 EEG study actually measured
If Bonaiuto’s model is the theory, the 2017 brain study is the measurement. The researchers had 30 participants look at caricatures of famous people while activity was recorded using 64 electrodes on the scalp. The caricatures varied in two ways: how strongly the face was distorted, and whether the emotional traits were negative or positive. The big question was when and where in the brain laughter takes shape.
The results are more refreshing than you might expect from a lab. Greater distortion produced a stronger humorous response. Negative traits produced a stronger response than positive ones. The differences appeared in several of the so-called ERP components, including N170, N270, N400, and later waves, especially over the right frontal lobe. In the frequency analysis, theta activity differed in areas including the anterior and posterior cingulate cortex, while alpha and beta activity differed in motor areas. The researchers link these areas to emotional processing, memory retrieval, and the kind of processing associated with laughter and enjoyment.
What does this mean for a living room wall? Two things. First, the study confirms that exaggeration is the fuel of humor: the further the image departs from what is expected, the stronger the reaction, as long as the viewer still recognizes what they are looking at. Second, it shows that humor isn’t a simple feeling, but a chain of steps involving memory and emotion. That explains why an image that works for you might fall flat with your neighbor. The caricatures in the study were of famous people, which assumes that viewers already recognize their faces. Visual humor always rests on shared prior knowledge.
Duchamp’s mustache and Magritte’s pipe: the joke art history took seriously
Art history has always had an ambivalent relationship with jokes. At the same time, some of the 20th century’s most influential works are fundamentally funny. In 1919, Marcel Duchamp drew a mustache and a goatee on a reproduction of the Mona Lisa and titled it L.H.O.O.Q., a play on words that, when pronounced in French, becomes an obscene sentence. In 1929, René Magritte painted a pipe and wrote beneath it that it was not a pipe. Both work with exactly what Bonaiuto describes: a contradiction clear enough for everyone to see, and playful enough that no one feels threatened.
Duchamp also appears in Philip Welding's 2024 essay. Welding discusses his work Three Standard Stoppages from 1913–1914, in which threads were dropped from a height of one meter and allowed to form their own measurements, as an example of chance and failure becoming art. He also mentions Fischli and Weiss's Equilibres series from 1984–1987, in which everyday objects balance on one another in impossible piles, photographed just before they topple. Duchamp and Fischli/Weiss have one thing in common: they let the joke hinge on what almost goes wrong.
Tip: Test a humorous image by asking yourself whether the joke still works when you already know the punchline. Images built around a single punchline get tiresome after a few weeks. Images where the joke lies in the form, the color, or a small detail you only notice after months last longer.
The still image freezes the moment before the accident: Welding's thesis on photography and laughter
In his 2024 essay, Philip Welding argues that the still image is a particularly good format for humor. His reasoning draws on semiotician Roland Barthes: a photograph freezes a moment and makes it ambiguous because we don't know what happened just before or after. That ambiguity invites the viewer to fill in what happens next, and the joke is born in that space. Welding's point is that the viewer swings between physically sensing the danger and knowing the image is staged. It's the same balance between closeness and distance that Bonaiuto describes.
Welding draws on online figures to show how widespread the phenomenon is. A search for #epicfail on Instagram returned 1,409,488 results on January 7, 2023. The FailArmy channel on YouTube had 16.6 million subscribers in July 2023, and a single compilation of office fails had 4.5 million views. He also mentions Marina Abramović and Ulay's Rest Energy from 1980, a performance in which a taut bow is aimed at Abramović's heart for 4 minutes and 7 seconds, and Erwin Wurm's one-minute sculptures. Here, the joke comes close to tipping over into seriousness.
One important caveat: Welding's text is a practice-based, qualitative essay. It contains no audience studies or experiments, and his interpretations of how viewers react are his own. That makes it interesting as a framework for ideas, but not as evidence. Treat it as a sharp conceptual framework, not a measurement.
How to hang a joke: rounded shapes, warm colors, and enough distance
If we translate the research into wall art, the advice becomes surprisingly concrete. Bonaiuto's observation about rounded shapes and playful colors points toward illustrated subjects with soft contours, such as animals with human traits, exaggerated proportions, or objects behaving unexpectedly. The effect of exaggeration measured in 2017 points in the same direction: feel free to go a little too far, but not so far that the subject becomes unrecognizable. And Welding's idea of the frozen moment means that images where something is about to happen are often funnier than images where it has already happened.
Placement matters because humor is social. In the hallway, people see an image in passing, often standing, often with a stranger beside them, and that’s where a joke that lands in a second works well. At the dining table or in the kitchen, people linger and can appreciate an image with more layers. In the bedroom, the joke can become a little too loud, where quieter, more concise humor works better. Read more about how placement affects the experience in our guide to the context effect and why a poster looks different at home, and about how the name of an image shapes what we see in the research on the title effect.
The same logic applies to format as with other designs. A small poster in 21x30 or 30x40 works where the joke is meant to be discovered up close, such as in a stairwell or above a dresser. A large poster in 50x70 or 70x100 works where the punchline should be visible from across the room. Choose a simple wooden or black metal frame, since an ornate frame adds another layer that competes with the joke. If you want the illustration to feel playful yet still grown-up, take a look at how artist Charlie Mackesy’s sketches work as wall art in our article about his exhibition at Dulwich.
Bozetto’s selection includes humorous posters featuring everything from dry wordplay to cartoon characters, and illustration posters where soft shapes and warm colors make the contradiction feel safe. For those who enjoy museum-level irony, there are pop culture posters, where the joke often relies on something we all already recognize. Remember that research says prior knowledge is a prerequisite for humor, so choose a design whose reference you and your guests share.
What research doesn’t know - and why that’s a good thing
There are gaps in the research worth mentioning. None of the studies above examines how long a visual joke stays funny, or what happens when we see the same image every morning for a year. Bonaiuto’s model is theoretical, the EEG study used caricatures of famous people in laboratory conditions, and Welding writes as an artist and researcher rather than as someone taking measurements. So we can’t claim that a humorous poster becomes less funny over time. We can only note that the logic of the models, where humor depends on the contradiction feeling new, suggests that images with multiple layers last longer than images with a single punchline.
It’s a charming kind of uncertainty. Humor is one of the few emotions art can evoke without having to be serious, and research has only just begun to measure it. In the meantime, you can run your own experiment: hang up the picture and notice whether it still makes you smile after three months. It’s a test no EEG measurement can do for you.
Frequently asked questions about humor in art and posters
Want to give your wall a picture that makes guests smile before they’ve even taken off their shoes? Start with the collection of humorous posters, choose a design with soft shapes and warm colors, and complete it with a slim frame that lets the joke do its work. If it’s still hanging there and making you smile after six months, you’ve found the right one.
Sources: Bonaiuto (2006) in Empirical Studies of the Arts, the study on humorous drawings (2017) and Welding (2024) in Societies.