An essay by Anne Wilkes Tucker
	Recently, my oldest nephew and I were curled on respective sofas reading the Sunday edition of The New York Times. Because I knew he would be amused, I read aloud a passage from an obituary reporting that a professional organization of librarians had given a lifetime membership in their organization to one of their oldest and most esteemed colleagues. The recipient was 103. We then pursued our mirth by speculating on the award committee’s discussion before the vote. Had they considered waiting another year? Had it been considered at an earlier age and rejected as premature? What other awards had they considered for a 103-year-old man besides a lifetime membership? Was he amused or even conscious? Humor is best when shared with someone with the same skewed slant on life, and I am a receptive audience for David Carol’s humor. A few years ago I was mid-way through a project that had been difficult and would continue to try my patience and my talents for several more years. When I saw Carol’s photograph of a turtle that is halfway across a wide rock-filled, dry riverbed, I laughed in recognition. Both the turtle and I had a bumpy road ahead. I could only hope that I did not appear as dourly determined as the turtle. It’s hard to describe many of Carol’s images for the same reason that if you have to explain humor, it’s not funny. The target audience has to be with you. Either you laugh or you don’t when you see Carol’s photograph of a child swimming with a snorkel and a mask in water so cloudy that he can’t possibly see his hand, much less the bottom of the pool. Either you enjoy speculating about the presence of a disembodied hand holding an American flag that is sticking out from the lid of a car trunk or you pass the image by. One of my favorite pictures is of caged bananas. (Did the monkeys escape?) Not all of Carol’s photographs are humorous. In one, he focuses on a sad faced Russian ticket agent. (This tells me he has probably looked seriously at the work of Robert Frank.) In another picture, you are drawn to the gnarled hands of a food seller. Sometimes he is drawn to quiet, seemingly peaceful spots, such as a truck parked in the shade of a lone tree in Aruba or a storage hut on an empty beach in Miami. Like most photographers, he photographs his friends, and he is drawn to American flags displayed on the sides of buildings, in poster vitrines, and from awnings. But I return most often to the images that make me laugh, such as the photograph of Carol’s friend Joe Chanin imitating an Eskimo while he holds up a large, very frozen fish. I smile in recognition at the case of empty beer bottles dumped in the middle of a country road, and at the three Turkish children in their communion regalia, one of whom wears tough-guy, mirrored sunglasses. I bet that David Carol and I could sit in a suburban shopping mall for a couple of hours and enjoy people watching together. We humans are a strange species and it is easier to get through life with a little gentle humor over our foibles and frailties. Anne Wilkes Tucker Gus and Lyndall Wortham Curator Museum of Fine Arts, Houston