The Funniest People in Art: 250 Anecdotes

This is a short, quick, and easy read.

Most of these anecdotes are probably just OK, but there should be at least one or two that you will want to tell your friends.

Anecdotes are retold in my own words to avoid plagiarism.

Most of these anecdotes are meant to be funny, but some are meant to be thought-provoking.

- In 2006, South Dakota instituted almost a total ban on abortions. Bill Napoli, a South Dakota State Senator, supported this ban, saying that women should not be allowed to have abortions even if they get pregnant for "simple rape." (He did say that he would make an exception for a religious virgin who gets pregnant from a brutalizing rape.) Cartoonist Stephanie McMillan saw Mr. Napoli's words as expressing a belief that women shouldn't be allowed to make decisions for themselves, so she created a cartoon in which a woman character telephones Mr. Napoli when she is asked to make a decision about which salad dressing to use -- the character asks Mr. Napoli, "Roasted pepper vinaigrette or honey mustard?" The cartoon included Mr. Napoli's work and home telephone numbers, which many other women used to call him. One woman asked him whether her bra and panties should match; another woman asked him whether she should use tampons or pads.

- After the 1906 San Francisco earthquake, which destroyed most of the city, architect Julia Morgan was hired to rebuild the Fairmont Hotel, in part because of her expertise in reinforced concrete, which was at that time a new material. Women architects were rare, so a woman reporter inspected the Fairmont Hotel, then asked the foreman, "Is the building really in the charge of a woman architect?" The foreman replied, "This building is in [the] charge of a real architect, and her name happens to be Julia Morgan." After the building was completed, another woman reporter came to see it. Standing in the dining room, which was decorated with gold, gray, ivory, and scarlet, she said to Ms. Morgan, "How you must have reveled in this chance to squeeze dry the loveliest tubes in the whole world of color!" Ms. Morgan replied, "I don't think you understand just what my work here has been. The decorative part was done by a New York firm. My work has all been structural."

- One of the ways that comedian Whoopi Goldberg knew that she was beginning to make it big was that caricaturist Harry Hirschfeld worked his art on her in The New York Times while she was appearing on a one-woman show on Broadway. Mr. Hirschfeld traditionally hides his daughter's name -- Nina -- in his caricatures, and in his caricature of Ms. Goldberg he wrote "Nina" 40 times. Ms. Goldberg was so pleased with Mr. Hirschfeld's caricature that she sent him flowers.