Remember the " 'Taint funny, McGee" refrain?

The quality of some of the humor on display in The Contemporary Museum's "Situation Comedy" exhibit raises the question, "How funny are jokes from our 'hanabata' days?"

During the golden years of radio, one of the most popular sitcoms was "Fibber McGee and Molly." Toward the end of each episode, McGee would make some wisecrack about a bad situation that usually he had caused, to which his wife Molly would always answer: " 'Taint funny, McGee."

To some who visit this exhibition, in spite of a few laughs here and there, the spirit of Molly's rejoinder may very well be channeled again from radio sitcom heaven.

A situation comedy is a genre of comedy performance originally devised for radio but today typically found on television. It usually consists of recurring characters in humorous story lines centered on a common environment, such as a family home or workplace.

The humor is derived from people being placed in uncomfortable, embarrassing or unfamiliar situations. Think "Cheers," "Seinfeld," "Friends," "Everybody Loves Raymond."

This exhibition asks us to admit it: We sometimes want to laugh at contemporary art.

During the past decade, humor has turned up with increasing frequency in galleries and museums, perhaps as an alternative to the tears of pain this world, especially of late, provokes.

"Situation Comedy" presents more than 50 works — a selection of video and sound installations, paintings, sculptures, drawings and photographs — by younger as well as more established artists, including Tom Friedman, Rodney Graham, William Pope.L, Richard Prince, Kay Rosen and Erika Rothenberg, contemporary artists working primarily in North America and Europe.

There is humor tinged with sarcasm and self-deprecation in the works of American artists Cary Liebowitz and Tony Tasset; farce in Danish artist Peter Land's recorded performances; and ironic visual and verbal incongruities in the work of Italian artist Maurizio Cattelan and in the staged scenes depicted by Austrian artist Erwin Wurm.

Employing parody, satire, slapstick and practical jokes, they use the leveling power of comedy to break down barriers of taste, to establish rapport with their audience, to encourage laughter in museum environments that are too often considered sacrosanct, austere and humorless and to question authority at every turn — including the very exhibition itself.

The human condition has been the subject of comedy for eons, from ancient Greek theater to the daily comic strip to TV sitcoms.

As Charles B. Hands once wrote, comedy is the thinking person's response to experience, while tragedy is the response of the person with feeling.

In a restricted sense, comedy refers only to dramatic presentations, but it is commonly applied to nondramatic works as well.

Comedies take many different forms, but they all share three basic characteristics:

1. The values that present the conflict in comedies are social as determined by societal consensus, as opposed to tragedy's values that are universal and beyond the control of humankind.

2. Characters in comedies are often defined primarily in terms of their society and their role within it.

3. Finally, comedies often end with a restored social order.

The norms of comedy are primarily social; the protagonist is always in a group or a situation that emphasizes commonness.

And in a time of widespread political upheaval like the present, artists often inject humor, both lighthearted and dark, into their work.

Humor is a tricky commodity. Timing is everything, and one person's joke is another's non sequitur or is simply not funny.

Choosing video as their medium, some artists have adopted familiar tropes from movies and television to generate comic situations, as in the works of German artist Christian Jankowski and American artist Michael Smith.

Moving into a more sarcastic area are the works of Americans Dana Schutz and John Waters.

In Schutz's heavily impastoed canvases — "Sneeze (blonde woman)" and "Sneeze 2" — the thick paint resembles palpable sneeze residue, while in Waters' photo series, "Hair in the Gate," recognizable scenes from great movies are ruined by huge, glaring hairs marring their perfection.

For every theatrical production, for every art exhibition, fundamental questions beg to be answered: Why this, why now?

Certainly humor at this time and place is a necessary tonic for the hearts and souls of our American psyches, war-torn and storm-ravaged as we have been. But is the material funny, and more basically, is it work whose quality captivates and excels beyond its comedic intentions?

Comedy, like tragedy, works best when it's embedded in the reality of human character and situation.

Judged by this yardstick, the exhibition is a hit and a miss. Laughs are certainly available, but the look of the show is thin, with most works barely sustainable as quality works unto themselves, transcending the limited purpose of making comedic statements.

Not surprisingly, the most successful embodiments of the theme are performance-oriented pieces, especially the videos.

Highlights: Luis Gispert's video "Block Watching," featuring a scantily dressed young lady suggestively miming the sound of city sirens; Susan Smith-Pinelo's "Sometimes," an equally suggestive study in the versatility of female breasts; and Laura Nova's clever interactive standup karaoke installation, "On the Spot."

David C. Farmer holds a bachelor's degree in painting and drawing and a master's in Asian and Pacific art history from the University of Hawai'i-Manoa.