Anti-Joke Chicken
Oil on canvas · 40 × 40 cm · 2024
This one 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 to caption jokes that set up a punchline and then deliberately refuse to deliver one. Instead you get the flat, literal, faintly deadpan answer — the format traces back to the oldest anti-joke there is: “Why did the chicken cross the road? To get to the other side.” No twist, no wordplay, just the obvious answer stated completely straight. That’s the whole joke — the anticlimax is the punchline.
I liked the idea of taking a format built entirely around not delivering what you expect, and rendering it in a medium — oil painting — that’s usually reserved for things people take very seriously.