In this age of global communication and dissolving national boundaries, it might seem heretical to suggest that cultural difference still exists and continues to enrich dialogues between countries, regions and ethnic groups. We need hardly look far to see how national identity is still a pivotal referent of individual identity. Peoples who, to an outsider might appear ethnically and culturally identical fight for the differences produced by religion, history and tribal loyalties. More benign forms of cultural difference justify international biennales, local curatorial policy and cultural exchanges carrying the conviction that art, video art in particular, communicates ideas and perceptions that are revitalised when given an airing in a different national context. The UK/Canadian Video Exchange is now in its second year, and although the dialogue it has stimulated is as often predicated on similarity as difference, the festival continues to interrogate our views of local practice and in a rapidly contracting world what it is that constitutes a national identity.

Maggie Warwick at the Canadian High Commission became convinced that we might find some answers by looking at films and videos that revolve around humour. In her catalogue essay to accompany the UK programme entitled 'Alchemy or the Divine Art of Deception', she draws a parallel between good art and good humour:

"At their best, both have the ability to alter perception, to question the status quo, to transcend the everyday; in other words: to transform. Intelligent humour, like art, has the potential to change the way we look at the world."

Drawing on the entire collection of independent film & video at the Lux Centre, we found a number of works reflecting the transgressive behaviour of madness and its popular manifestation in the silly walks and anti-social outbursts of the Pythons. Andrew Kotting's Klipperty-Klop (1984) shows the artist similarly breaking the bounds of English decorum by prancing around a field like a manic pagan mystic mumbling stories about a man with a horse. This tradition of the fool, or the court jester sanctioned to cross the boundaries of acceptable behaviour is similarly at work in Mark Wallinger's Hymn (1998). Holding a balloon, the artist stands on a box on Primrose Hill singing in a helium-induced falsetto about all God's little children. The absurdity of his performance has earned him the ultimate accolade of being featured in Private Eye's Pseud's Corner. The Chapman brothers offer us art historical silliness in their gruesome glove-puppet tale of Sacrifice, Mutilation and Death in Modern Art (1999). Van Gogh's ear is cut off, Andy Warhol gets shot and Pollock's toy car hurtles towards its inevitable collision with a tree. The fool can also be strong and silent, and like Marcel Marceau weave his parodies in his deployment of telling bodily gestures. Harrison & Wood are dead pan performers to camera who create minimalist sculptural environments in which gravity and mass are miraculously outwitted. Understatement is also a feature of John Smith's Girl Chewing Gum (1976) in which the artist gives directorial instructions to unsuspecting passers-by on a London street. Linguistic games of this kind are fundamental to the deconstructive traditions of early independent Film and Video in England. David Hall's This is a Television Receiver (l976) is a critique of television realism while Tony Hill takes on the camera and viewer's point-of-view in his vertiginous Holding the Viewer (1993). Scratch Video of the mid 1980s produced the literal deconstruction of television language in the work of the Duvet Brothers and Gorilla Tapes who in this programme offer us The President's World (1988). Ronald Reagan's old films are intercut with news reportage reinterpreting his political career as a poorly scripted Hollywood romance...