Short video made using footage produced while researching in the National Museum of American History (May-June 2016) as part of the Smithsonian Artist Research Fellowship and in studio in December/January. The fellowship, which was essentially daily reading tens of thousands of index cards printed with jokes for and by Phyllis Diller in an airless storage room, required extensive security credentialing. I made a connection between the bulk collection of Americans' data by the NSA, and this "innocuous" bulk collection of joke data. The activity of collecting and reading it are both somewhat absurd – no one in the institution had read more than a handful of the jokes, but the cabinet had been on display as a jewel of the collection. I started making connections between comedians' costumes (glasses, ties, gloves, mustaches, etc.) and spycraft disguises (glasses, ties, gloves, mustaches, etc.). At the same time, with the political climate, I am noticing a reversal of the Marxist quote "History repeats itself, first as tragedy, second as farce." – it now seems that the mediated world is first as farce, now as tragedy.

I saw this in the joke file of Diller: seemingly innocuous (Diller was famously so-called apolitical) jokes from the 1990s about Donald Trump profiting on his fame (when he was in the news for his marriage to Marla Maples):

In the video, I couple this research (fabricated "secret" video I made of rifling through the file cabinet), video of a photo-shoot of objects in the collection, online shopping, reading, FBI files received by FOIA (freedom of information act) requests, diplomatic cables, etc.