Modern artists make jokes through juxtapositions. Cubism offers the Ur-example: a Victorian tassel hanging in an angular modern setting. This comedy of styles is by no means the only kind of comedy in modern art, but because it is formalist—based on juxtaposing forms in unlikely ways—it’s uniquely modern. Examples can be found in the collages of Schwitters and Cornell, the sculptures of Picasso and Calder, the paintings of Klee, Léger, Miró, and Gerald Murphy. Like the comedy of manners, which flourishes in periods when manners are changing but a generally accepted idea of manners is still vivid in people’s minds, the comedy of styles flourishes in periods when styles are in flux but the idea of stylistic homogeneity remains credible. Perhaps this is why it has been more difficult to sustain a comedy of styles since World War II. In the early decades of the century such juxtapositions were often meant as celebrations of a new age: by invoking previous styles, artists demonstrated exactly how contemporary the contemporary world was. But as the line separating premodern and modern becomes hazier, it is more difficult to believe in a comedy of styles. The clarifying humor in Saul Steinberg’s dizzy drawings of postwar New York has to do with the artist’s sense of the city as a melange of styles where no clear principle of contrast or construction obtains. But Steinberg’s taste was formed in Europe, before he came to America, and so he brings to New York the old