Anti-Joke Chicken
Oil on canvas · 40 × 40 cm · 2024
This painting joins my Memes series — internet memes reimagined in oil.
The Anti-Joke Chicken is an image macro built around a chicken photographed mid-stare, used for jokes that set up a punchline and then deliberately refuse to deliver one. Instead you get the flat, literal, faintly deadpan answer. The meme traces back to the oldest anti-joke there is: “Why did the chicken cross the road? To get to the other side.”
I liked the idea of taking a picture built entirely around not delivering what you expect, and rendering it in oil, a medium that’s usually reserved for images people take very seriously.