Eric Yahnker

The Serious Side of a Joke

- Sage Vaughn

There's a game I like to play where I try to link a musician and an artist whose careers, styles, or personas echo each other. Here's some easy ones: Louise Bourgeois is Patti Smith, FUTURA is Suicide, Kara Walker is Nina Simone and Salvador Dali is Frank Zappa. There are some others that are also good but may not be as perfect a match: Alex Katz could be Billy Joel, Mary Weatherford could be Alice Coltrane, Urs Fischer could be DEVO, and Picasso might be the closest this game gets to the Rolling Stones. Now I am sure there are some good Dua Lipas and Bad Bunnys; I just don't know what they are yet. Time helps. A little bit of length of tooth in the career makes it easier to pair such entities. But I am having a hard time coming up with a match for the subject of this article. Maybe Eric Yahnker is Ween? At times his humor reminds me a little of James Murphy's deadpan lyrical witticisms, but other times he swings for the fences and is orbiting Weird AI territory... which is a good thing when you are trying to accomplish what Yahnker is working towards: Humor in Art. How do you make a joke someone would want to live with?