One of the implications of an address to humor that "doesn’t try" for it, is that the comic in this dimension is more often found than invented. It is deeply situational -- tied to, almost trapped by its contexts -- rather than artfully contrived or otherwise acted out. If we want to understand the sense of absurdity that arises so palpably in John Baldessari’s work we will find that it is firmly embedded in the textures of his life and career, in places and purposes that were already inflected by the offbeat and the incongruous. An incubator for all this was the non-descript suburb of National City, near San Diego, California, the “cultural blank spot” where Baldessari was born (in 1931), came of age, and in -- and about -- which he made his first "conceptual" art works in the mid-1960s. 

If the situational disavowal to which Baldessari has long been committed can be related to any conceptual format for the comedic, it is to the venerable, and distinctively American, notion of the deadpan. Introduced in the later 1920s to describe a turn in the style of film comedy at the height of the silent era, deadpan offered a striking metaphor for a kind of humor that eschewed expression, emotion or motile physicality -- aided and abetted by distinctively filmic resources such as the close-up and reaction shot -- in favor of physiognomic reduction and impassive restraint. Humor was engendered in the deadpan mode by a general economy of means antithetical to the slapstick and vaudeville genres that dominated the earliest years of film comedy. The origins of the term itself are still disputed. Some sources attribute it to the general assimilation of “firearm phraseology” so that “pan” refers to the pan of a musket, and “dead” to the failure of the powder it contained to ignite (“keeping ones powder dry” arrived in the language from the same context). Another etymology has “pan” as “face,” a sense apparently in circulation since at least 1833. So that the expressionlessness signified by deadpan “would mean literally ‘dead face.’” Whatever its precise origins, however, there is unanimity that the deadpan idiom was given its coup de grace in the films of Buster Keaton, the great “Stoneface,” whose unsmiling, immobile features and unreactive demeanor have been celebrated by James Agee and other commentators as one of the definitive contributions to the comedic repertoire. "Keaton's deadpan,” noted Wes Gehring, “is a twentieth-century defense against the absurdities of the modern world."

Baldessari raised the stakes of the deadpan by breaking down the defense.