English art critic Matthew Collings presents this fifth episode of "This Is Modern Art," a six-part series made for Channel 4 in 1999. His subject here is the joke: why so much contemporary art plays for laughs, and what that humor is actually doing underneath the gag. Collings moves through galleries and studios looking at work built on irony, absurdity, and deliberate bad taste, treating the comedy as a strategy rather than a lapse in seriousness. He argues that laughing at a piece does not mean dismissing it, and that plenty of art using jokes is doing real conceptual work, undermining the solemnity that used to define "serious" art. The tone stays conversational and skeptical rather than academic, in keeping with the series' style of treating art criticism as an argument you could have in a pub. Sources on the episode's specific artists and examples are limited, but its core question, whether a joke can carry as much weight as tragedy, drives the half hour.