In art and aesthetics, we hear a lot of talk about beauty (as in the classic “transcendentals”—truth, goodness, and beauty), and, of course, beauty is a wonderful thing, and it can be broadly construed to cover all sort of phenomena, including sunsets, symphonies, and mathematical equations. But there’s an exalted cast to the term, such that beautiful things are distinguished from merely pretty things, as if you went slumming when you stepped down from beauty. (And then there’s the other problem of ignoring the sublime, which is a step up from beauty in impact.) This is to say a focus on beauty alone can distract one from the broad range of proper aesthetic interest, which includes artful horsing around. 

The Cardinal Newman Society says that beauty “involves apprehending unity, harmony, proportion, wholeness, and radiance,” and that covers a lot of ground, but does it cover enough ground to do justice to the range of deliciously quirky, aesthetically arresting phenomena? Does it stipulate gravitas when some cockeyed works deserve respect? What about “painful” puns (as with the fish who returned a billfold dropped overboard from a rowboat—“Carp to carp walleting”) and goofy malapropisms (e.g., “Texas has a lot of electrical votes”), and other sorts of word play?

Take, for instance, this sign, one I saw at the entrance to a private housing compound in Florida, the road leading to a small museum holding a great collection of historical artifacts. Visits were “by invitation only,” and security was an issue. So the owner chose this clever name for the drive, one that seemed to honor a former Portuguese colony on the coast of India. But it really said, “Stay out!” I suppose you could call it “beautiful,” but “funny” seems more fitting.

Once you grant aesthetic honors to the “hilarious,” you can see the dignity in collecting verbally nutty treasures. I think for instance of “I’d rather have a free bottle in front of me than a prefrontal lobotomy.” Or how about those palindromes in Weird Al Yankovic’s parody of Bob Dylan’s music video for Subterranean Homesick Blues (originally shot in a London alley, with Beat poet, Allen Ginsberg, dressed as a rabbi in the background). In place of Dylan’s impressionistic lyrics printed on cards he dropped one by one, we get Al’s version, with such deliverances as “Oozy rat in a sanitary zoo,” “Lisa Bonet ate no basil,” “Do geese see God?” and “Senile felines”.

When I showed the video to a friend, he directed me to The Ballad of Palindrome music video featuring Riders in the Sky. My favorite line comes in response to the rhetorical question, “You’re not trying to lose weight on one of those fast diets?”: “Doc. Note I dissent. A fast never prevents a fatness. I diet on cod.”

Beautiful? I think I’d go with “amazing” and even “sublime.”