On October 12th, Caitlin Cass, Ilaamen Pelshaw, and Ella Weber sat down with Michael Griffin to take a closer look at irony, contradiction, and exaggeration as critical strategies in creative practice that subvert dominant narratives and challenge long-held assumptions with a wink and a smile.

Michael Griffin, Caitlin Cass, Ilaamen Pelshaw, Ella Weber (from left to right)

Title of Discussion: Wit as Witness: Humor and Satire in Contemporary Art

Panelist 1: Caitlin Cass

Panelist 2: Ilaamen Pelshaw

Panelist 3: Ella Weber

Moderator: Michael Griffin

Date of Discussion: October 10, 2025

List of Acronyms: [CC] = Caitlin Cass; [IP] = Ilaamen Pelshaw; [EW] = Ella Weber; [MG] = Michael Griffin

Transcript

[MG] Hey everyone, how are we doing? I'm Michael Griffin. It's great to meet you all. So a little bit about this event, and then me, and then the panelists in that order. I think artists have a lot of different levels of credibility as change makers and agents of change. If you look at humor throughout history, it has intrinsically been related to shifting power dynamics. We think about jesters as chumps and jokers but historically, throughout the world, jesters have been one of the few forces that could question kings and queens. When democracy is eroded, comedy and humor are some of the first mediums that come under attack, and I believe it’s for that reason.

To dive in, I’m going to introduce our panelists. First, we have Caitlin. Caitlin works in comics and recently published a book that uplifts marginalized figures of the suffrage movement. Her work has been published in the New Yorker, which is pretty cool. Ilaamen satirizes imperial colonialism to question ongoing injustices in her painting and illustration and Ella uses text, video, and installation to playfully interrogate disparities in gender and labor equity.

So, take this however you all would like. But, broadly speaking, can you all articulate how humor and satire play foundational roles in your art? Whoever wants to dive in first.

[CC] Okay, I’ll go first. Humor in my work is kind of rooted in trying to organize my anxiety about the world. And that manifests in a couple different ways. One of the ways it manifests is by projecting them onto cartoon characters and then trying to read their minds. So, with this cartoon, I was, at the time, going to museums a lot with high school students. When I sat down to make the cartoon, I was pushing the hyperbole by imagining them as younger than they were and then me being affiliated with the institution instead of just a guest in the institution. And then I looked into her eyes and imagined what that would be like for her and wrote down what she said to me. Ultimately, when I went back, I realized that it was also a commentary on many layers of different power structures in that institution, right? The problem of how money or art gets bought and sold or stolen, and then, also, of course, the way she was identifying with the institution as a part of capitalism and feeling like your employment defines you. And I think humor is a great vessel to encapsulate all of that and hold the contradiction without saying anything about it. Just by pointing at it.

*The hall of stuff we stole from other cultures,* Caitlin Cass

[IP] In my work, I am not a funny person in general and if you know me, you know I'm not a joker or anything, but I try to inject irony into my characters. I think that when you introduce humor into your work, it makes it more approachable and it connects better with others. I think it's also a way to critique. It helps you discern a little bit the audience and they are open to. It’s a different way to communicate when you are using humor instead of direct criticism. Not all of my pieces expose what I am trying to say very openly. I try to use a lot of layers so, if you're passing by you maybe think, “Oh this painting is cute.” Then once you start talking with me, you see all these layers of what I am talking about.

I have responded directly to issues around colonialism in my work. I’m from Guatemala and you can still feel the presence of it every day, even though it’s many years now that we are independent. But I make other work that is a bit more subtle and that reveals something about characters all of us have seen and known. Sometimes those characters are us. We all have layers that come from suffering certain injustices and sometimes we realize that we are repeating the same injustices. I want people to ask questions like that when they stand in front of my art. I want them to think a little deeper and ask, “Am I the abuser right now?” I think that’s how we take responsibility for the harm that we all are inflicting on others even sometimes without meaning it or without paying attention to it. My characters are cute and maybe that is what makes it funny, but it's also where the irony lies in my work.

[EW] For me, I think humor is the thread that ties all of my work together, and I use it to connect with people, to be vulnerable. This is an early childhood painting of mine, which I think is kind of funny that it's a sad clown. At eight years old, I chose to depict a sad clown. When I found this, I was like, “Wow, I haven't changed at all.” And so for me, comedy is always married to sadness and I'm always working with this tension and the contradictions that come with it. So yeah, I'm relatively sad.

This is a self-portrait, sans bangs. I was born with my same exact haircut right out of the womb. I made it while on a month-long residency in Vegas and it’s called, “My Bangs Behave Badly in Vegas.” I woke up every morning in the heat and that was what I looked like. I'm a storyteller mostly, I would say. A lot of my work tells very big stories with these one-offs within them. I like wordplay, even just something as simple and childlike as “bangs behaving badly,” but just the word “bang” can also have a double meaning, especially when paired with Vegas.

*Bangs Behaving Badly in Vegas,* Ella Weber

I included this image to show that I have the credentials to be on this panel. It's not my MFA diploma, which also, you know, did me well. It got me a job at a minimum wage job at a deli for seven years. I slept in my parents' windowless basement for seven years. But I also took a stand-up class at Metro. My dad did it too. He signed up behind my back. That was part of the comedy, carpooling with my dad to this class, because all dads are funny, or they think they're funny.

I also wrote a book called The Deli Diaries, and this book was supposed to be funny. And much to the disappointment of many family and friends, there are no pictures in this book. It's all text. But I tried to have a lot of fun just with the layout and the design of the text to elicit humor. My favorite endorsement for this book was from a comedian, Noah Asheroff, who said it’s “The perfect book for those who don't read.” It’s based on the seven years I spent working in the deli. I turned the deli into my studio and a self-imposed residency. I kind of felt like I beat the system, you know? Like, okay, now this job has value to me. I'm finally getting paid to make art. A lot of funny things, silly things happened there, so much so that it veered into the land of absurdity. I brought ham into the bathroom on my lunch breaks. And these three existential slices of ham hovering above asked, “Who am I? What am I? Where am I?” It's just ham obviously, but it’s also kind of this existential questioning, a search for identity.

To that end, this is my most recent project called, Sorry for Your Loss. It documents a two-year period during which I experienced a lot of personal losses, but it inevitably kind of became funny. I think humor, I just can't really escape it. And I think I also use it as a form of survival.

[MG] There's a lot of beauty in that. Some big points that I heard were just how humor can really point out and help us systems that can be difficult to know. Another thing is critiquing kindly. I feel like critiquing kindly is a lost art in 2025. And, you know, being married to the sadness but still being able to laugh. All of those are really ways humor in creative work can help us move through life.

You all touched briefly on the idea of audience, and I'd like to know, in your creative practices, what role does the audience play? A lot of artists say, “This is for me and whoever likes it, likes it.” Are you thinking about how your audiences will respond to the work outside of that? How do you consider the audience?

[CC] I guess it depends on what I'm working on. During the first pass, I don’t think about the audience too much. It's just a place to process how I relate to something, whether it's a historical text, like some of my history comics, like Suffrage Song, where I'm trying to relate to these historic women and the mistakes they made. Then on the second pass, I start thinking more about the pleasure of the reader and my own pleasure, and I try to refine what I said and weed out my hangups and my shame and take that out so that the message is clearer. And so when I'm making a cartoon, that kind of happens slowly by going over the line in my head as I'm drawing the image and trying to refine it until it lands in this space that feels like it's truly encapsulating what that person is thinking, anxiety they're feeling.

*I cant own money but I can wear this hat,* Caitlin Cass

I'm empathizing with these historical figures. I'm also in the materiality that existed at that time period of a fashion illustration in the women's magazine, which was a place where women had some freedom to speak in their own realm, that at the same time had to sort of succumb to the cultural mores at the time, which were that they weren't supposed to talk about politics, even though they, so they couldn't own property or have their own money. I'm just trying to imagine into that space where I can't own money, but I can wear this hat. It’s a way to feel empathy for this person, right? I hope humor opens a door for the audience to engage in that empathy with me. I think it's kind of like Hannah Arendt's idea of loving the world, or Amor Mundi, or having compassion for the world to think and act ethically in it. So, I guess my relationship with the audience is through humor. I hope that that will percolate and help me, and others, feel more empathetically.

[IP] I think that I am a little bit of a storyteller too, but not necessarily in the sense that I always communicate directly everything that I'm thinking in my work. I think about the audience indirectly when I am creating because I do care about fellow humans and I try to be very careful to never use humor to dehumanize anybody else, even if it's someone that I think is behaving in an evil way because you never know what someone else is going through. I think about audiences in a generalized sense, but I never think about one particular person when I'm creating one piece. Sometimes I’ll imagine a scenario or a story and then I imagine the character that can fit within it but it's never a direct conversation. It is never something that I want to be so clear that people will see it immediately. The wise monkeys, for example, is a very common pop art image I appropriated to critique how technology has influenced the ways we come to know each other. We have become so numb to others and immersed in digital modes of communicating that we sometimes lose the sense of how build authentic bonds with others. A lot of people just think it's so cute that the monkeys are using technology and that is the end of it. And I am fine with that. But I appreciate viewers who see that image and want to think more deeply about it.

As another example, this cute raccoon is all dressed up with a bowtie that you’ll notice is two pieces of pizza. He looks like just a cute little guy, but when I was creating it one of the threads that I was pulling at was workers’ rights and the fight for equality. In Latin America, unfortunately, there are even more disparities than here in the U.S. and I was imagining these workers, maybe a waiter or someone working in service, fully dressed and looking cute, but not having even the necessary means to meet the standards in their work, so he had to use whatever he had in the trash to polish even his attire. That's why his bowtie is made of pizza.

[EW] You’ll never make art that pleases everyone. I think ultimately, you have to follow that inner voice. Even when I got my book deal, immediately the publisher told me, this is a book not everyone's going to like. That’s something I accept as part of my practice. Not everyone's going to like this. But I also think the audience plays such an active participant role in my work. I think because I’m making long, big stories that take years of development, I'm very responsive to how the audience engages with them. There are several projects that I don't think I would have continued had I not had a certain engagement directly from the audience. I'll screenshot things that people say. I'm very active on Instagram, probably to an annoying degree. But, you know, I'll screenshot DMs that I get about the work, and I'll use that later on as the project evolves. 80% of The Deli Diaries was overheard interactions that you have with people. It's a way to take a pulse and gauge whether this is something that people respond to. Even something as simple as my car project--that was a private thing between me and my car. And then I shared it on Instagram, and it became a very polarizing thing. Half of my friends were like, “This is disgusting. Clean up your life. You are lazy.” Other ones that were like, “Let it rise. See how high you can get. Just keep going.” I don't know if I would have kept going had I not been encouraged.

[MG] There are some themes you all brought up just now that I want to reinforce. First, empathy. For me, in my stand-up practice, I realized there's a fundamental difference between making people laugh and helping people understand why something is funny. Second, interpretation can be unstable and vary by medium. And last, I think it's cool going into a project knowing not everyone's going to love it, while at the same time, paying attention to how the ones who do love it respond.

So, for the last question, comedy isn't hot in 2025. We see a lot of cultural shifts that come with some feelings of sadness and despair for a lot of people. How do you all make sure that the light of humor stays strong despite these times? How do you continue to find inspiration with everything going on?

[CC] Well, I'll just say that I was very grateful to be invited to this panel, because I was having a complicated relationship with humor, and it helped me think about it more. I was reading the news yesterday, and I was thinking how freaking crazy it is that governors are having to stand up to the national government deploying federal troops to cities in their states. And yet, they’re there on stage, like Dave Pritzker and Tim Walz, joking about who's gonna go to jail first. Not really a joke completely, right? I think humor is a survival mechanism now more than ever, which I think you said, Ella. I guess I'm realizing that and hoping that maybe I'll make some funny things again.

[IP] I think that we need to fight for the good things and in the midst of whatever you are living or experiencing, try to hold on to the things that are precious to you like goodness and laughter and kindness. That is an act of resistance. That is what this discussion is all about.

[EW] I go back to my eight-year-old self and comedy found in tragedy. 2025 is full of tragedy. So, maybe humor becomes harder to find, but it's still there. And it is a form of resistance. Even just taking that comedy class, our work each week was to just write down everything that happened to us throughout the week that could be funny. I mean, we're so oversaturated with news about the evil that's happening in the world, when we find lightness and humor, hopefully we can appreciate it more for all the good things it brings into our lives.

[MG] Thank you all. Let’s open up the floor for some participation with questions and answers.

[Audience Member] I'm so grateful to this panel because I also find myself looking for some levity. I heard an interview with Gloria Steinem recently who was talking about how laughter is an act of freedom. It's one of the emotions that you can't force people to have, you can't force anyone to laugh, laughter is voluntary. And I'm curious about the sort of, I want to say freedom inside inside of that. Do you feel more connected with an audience when there's laughter? Do you feel like people see themselves in your work because of that shared exchange?

[CC] That totally resonates. I was reading about trickster archetypes and this notion that in mythology across cultures, tricksters play central roles in helping other people learn. That trickster is in all of us. It’s a way to connect with people. Prometheus too, for example, in Greek mythology is this trickster figure who steals fire from the gods and brings it to Earth. He's a flawed figure that bridges the spiritual and material realms. It’s life and death understood through the trickster figure. And so, I think it's easy to connect with other people through humor because we all have to confront that contradiction of living and dying sooner or later. That’s an intense answer.

[MG] That's a bar right there. I'm going to get that tattooed on my forehead.

[EW] Yeah, the only thing I’ll add is that I’m doing a book tour where I give a, I call it “a stand-up comedy, Microsoft, PowerPoint, TED Talk Poetry reading.” I started before the book was out in 2020 and did it via Zoom where you have absolutely no interaction or engagement with the audience, and so you feel like you're completely bombing the entire time. So, yes, I resonate with that. It’s so nice when you have a face that you can see laughing or smiling back.

[Audience Member] I’m curious about you all engage with humor that you disagree with. It seems like comedy is alive and doing very well in certain circles where it’s used specifically to de-humanize.

[IP] That is a sensitive topic because as much as we don't appreciate censorship, and shouldn't censor another voice, I think that we all have experience of encountering a joke that, for you, is distasteful. You can turn the channel, unfollow the account or simply disconnect. You don't appreciate it; you don't follow it. I try to not even engage because sometimes the engagement is what gives it power.

[CC] I feel like that kind of humor, in those spaces, is often much less deep. It's very superficial. It’s just surface. It reinforces old, obvious stereotypes and doesn’t work to hold the contradictions of humor that inspires meaningful critique of imbalanced power dynamics. It might be easier for some people who aren't willing to hold contradiction within themselves.

[EW] Yeah, I watch a lot of bad TV, bad reality shows that are just, like, inherently poor taste, bad. But I view it almost as research and that’s helped try to exercise empathy, or try to understand where it’s coming from, or get the pulse of what's going on. I want to be curious and be aware and not totally isolated in my own perfect bubble.

[Audience Member] First of all, thank you so much for what you're all doing. You're making a huge difference in this world. My question is, what are three words you’d use to define what humor means to you and how does that manifest in your work?

[CC] I think wonder, surprise, solidarity. I mean I think for me it's just like how do you do it in life and then how do you show that in art, right? Like, empathizing with other people who are going through it or confronting big problems. I mean, it is hard to answer in a way because I feel kind of non-verbal about it. I think it's sort of like how you relate to people. It feels so fundamental to me that I don't know how to put it into words.

[IP] I think that for a lot of artists, it happens in the unconscious. How do I process things that I care about in a visual piece? I used to paint when I was a kid and then I started my graphic design career and I kind of abandoned painting. Then, the first time I had a heartbreak, I didn’t know how to process it and a lot of my friends said, “Let's go shopping. Let’s go buy things. That will make you feel better.” The only thing I bought were canvases and I realized this thing that I really care about is how I will keep my sanity.

[EW] I got caught up in the three words, but if we can go more than three words... I was reminded of my favorite studio visit I ever had. I was at a residency in upstate New York at Wassaic. There was this guest curator / artist and in my mind at the time, she was 93 years old. She was so frail. She had shaved white hair. And we had just listened to her artist talk. And everything was so profound. And she was soft spoken and just really slow. And at the time I was making work about Tinder and dating. And I was making these blind contoured drawings of Tinder men holding fish. This was kind of when Tinder was new. And I kind of wrote her off like when we had our studio visit. I was like “She's not going to even know what Tinder is.” And she came into my studio, and it felt like ten minutes of pure silence. I started to sweat because she wasn’t saying anything. And the first like profound soft-spoken words she said to me were, “Your work is so dumb.” And I was just like, “Great. This is an amazing studio visit.”

But then, she went a little deeper with it. And she was really the first person that saw that work, which most people saw as a kind of funny one liner. She was like, “Actually this work is really sad.” And she told me she thought some of the best artists are those that can go deep inside themselves to locate those inner contradictions and bring them to the surface and expose them so they cease to exist.

[MG] Did you just say you'll cease to exist, like your ego?

[EW] Yeah, like ego death. Hopefully the contradictions cease to exist through the art.

[MG] That's another good tattoo. We are on the tail end, unfortunately, so let's go down the line and let everybody know where to find you, where to see your work. And also I think it'd be nice to impart any advice that can about how to keep humor alive in these times.

[CC] You can find me on Instagram and online. And I don’t know if I have any advice. Be open to it. That's a simple thing to say but observe things and take the time to process them either through art or writing. I think that’s my advice.

[IP] I would say, think about absurdity. What is the absurdity of whatever is hurting you and hopefully you will get a laugh out of it. Maybe we can think into something more optimistic and when things really go down the drain, we will be in a better mindset. I appreciate optimism and I am not an optimist by nature, but my husband is. And you can find me on Instagram and online. Search I-L-A-A-M-E-N. I am the only one, so you will find me.

[EW] I think we have to always look at something fresh and anew. This artist, Mika Rotenberg said, “When anyone ever tells me how weird my work is, I tell them it's not nearly as weird as what's actually going on.” The world is bizarre, you know? It’s surprising and I think so much of humor is embracing the element of surprise. You can find me on my Instagram and my website where I have books for sale too.

[MG] Awesome. Thanks to our panelists and thank you to everybody for being here today.

* This transcript has been edited for length and clarity.

About the Panelists:

Caitlin Cass makes comics, cartoons and art installations about failing systems and irrational hope. Story by story she is building her own canon in a doomed effort to understand the dismal state of the world. For the past 14 years Caitlin has published a bimonthly comic periodical under the moniker The “Great” Moments in Western Civilization Postal Constituent. Her cartoons and comics have appeared in The New Yorker, The Lily and The Nib. Caitlin was a 2018 NYSCA/NYFA Artist Fellow in Fiction and a 2024 NAC Fellow in Literary Arts. Her 2020 solo exhibition Women’s Work was awarded a grant from the National Endowment for the Arts. Caitlin’s first full length graphic history Suffrage Song (Fantagraphics, 2024) won the 2025 Eisner Award for Best Reality-Based Work. Caitlin lives and works in Omaha, NE where she is Assistant Professor of Studio Art, Illustration and Time-Based Media at the University of Nebraska Omaha.

Ilaamen Pelshaw is a Latina artist, born and raised in Guatemala, with background in commercial graphic design and emphasis in illustration, her work is mainly figurative and graphic. Ilaamen is a storyteller who explores elements of everyday life in a colorful and cheerful way, often focused on kindness and inclusion. Since 2015 Ilaamen has participated in more than 40 exhibitions in different States and 3 local solo shows and her art can be found in private collections around Europe, Asia, Africa, and Central America.

Ella Weber is a basement-based artist who uses humor, performance, and storytelling within her mutli-faceted practice. Playfully upending the existential fabrics of daily life, Weber transforms her minimum-wage day jobs into her studio. Across the counter and screen, Weber blurs the line between employee and customer, performance and reality, art and life. Weber’s recent solo exhibitions include Western Exhibitions in Chicago, the Plains Art Museum in North Dakota, and Munson in Utica, NY. Group exhibitions include the Everson Museum in Syracuse, Contemporary Art Center in Cincinnati, IPCNY in New York, among others. Residencies include MASS MoCA, The NARS Foundation, Rogers Art Loft, PrattMWP, Ox-Bow School of Art, The Wassaic Project, Kimmel Harding Nelson, Signal Culture, Jentel, Byrdcliffe Guild and Anderson Ranch. Her debut novel The Deli Diaries was published with Latah Books in 2023. As part of her book tour, Weber continues to share a performative Stand-Up Comedy-Microsoft PowerPoint-TED Talk-Poetry Reading at colleges across the country. Arguably most significantly, Weber accidentally completed a 10-week community college course, entitled “How to Be a Stand-Up Comedian” with her dad. Privacy continues to be an issue. Weber received an MFA from the University of Kansas and BFA from the University of Nebraska–Lincoln. She currently lives and works in Omaha, Nebraska.

About the Moderator:

Michael Griffin's education was in saxophone jazz studies, sociology, and culminated with a Masters of Health Policy from Emory University. Along the way, he realized humor's role in fostering a culture of collaborative education with different types of people, which led him to direct, write, and star in a one-hour comedy special entitled 27 Club. At the same time, he worked in UNMC's public health department as the health programs manager for North Omaha and began a broadcasting career as a host on Riverside Chats, a local show airing Mondays at 12 PM on KIOS 91.5, where he is currently the executive producer. He is passionate about sharing stories of community members often overlooked in media, as well as society at large, and is deeply inspired by his mom, grandmother, and niece.

Alternate Currents programming is made possible with support from the Andy Warhol Foundation for the Visual Arts, Metropolitan Community College, and the Nebraska Arts Council and Nebraska Cultural Endowment.

AC Discussion | Wit as Witness: Humor and Satire in Contemporary Art

Transcript

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