Why Did the Kung Pao Chicken Cross the Road? humor us presents over one hundred works in a variety of media by twenty Asian American artists with ties to Southern California.  They display strategies of play, irony, foolery, parody, and satire, with works ranging from the delightfully silly or kitschy, to those that deploy humor as forms of social engagement and critique.  The exhibition as a whole seeks to create a context in which these manifestations, as well as the reception of humor, can be explored and even challenged. Humor is evasive: the more one tries to explain it, the more it diminishes. To wit, essayist E.B. White observed, "humour can be dissected as a frog can, but the thing dies in the process and the innards are discouraging to any but the pure scientific mind."  We attempt to not kill the creature: the elusive complexity of humor sharpened our desire as curators to see how artists were directly or indirectly engaging with it in their works. Moreover, we were curious to see what happens when you cross humor with Asian Americans (speaking of crossings). In doing so, humor us questions the parameters of identity, yet also recognizes the continuing importance of race and representation. Often the butt of jokes or the comic relief within mainstream media—from Fu Manchu to William Hung of American Idol notoriety—Asians and Asian Americans are often stereotyped as eternal foreigners, model minorities, inscrutable, nerdy and yes, humorless.                                                                                                                         Western understandings of humor have evolved from ancient Greek and Medieval origins as a system of four fluids (wet and dry humours) that governed the body and correlated to a person’s temperament. Although the physiological and medical tenets of this theory have been repudiated, humor’s connection to temperament (and by extension, humor’s subjective aspects) continue to captivate to this day. Contemporary Cultural Studies scholars David Eng and David Kazanjian posit that the concept of temperament in the ancient humours system laid a foundation for racial and ethnic categorizations; they are historically linked discourses. Other studies of humor led Freud to his theories about jokes and their relation to the unconscious, as well as to postcolonial theorist Homi Bhabha’s insight that humor is intricately linked to the construction of group identity. Among myriad variables including culture, class, age, education, gender, context, and so on that factor into the experience of humor, constructions of identity and stereotypes play an undeniable  role.  Southern California serves as a compelling site for humor us as it is the world’s putative media and entertainment capital and the premier gateway of Asian immigration; a site where representation and racialization, history and humor overlap.  humor us highlights artists who are themselves the creative stewards of comedy. These artists have taken the bull(frog) by its horns, ridden it, milked it, or set it loose in the China shop. Viet Le,  Yong Soon Min, Leta Ming Viet Le is an artist, creative writer, and curator. He recently curated the performance event Miss Saigon with the Wind (Highways Performance Space, CA), the visual art show Charlie Don’t Surf (Centre A in Vancouver, B.C.), and has organized numerous cultural arts projects as a board member of Vietnamese American Arts and Letters Association. He is currently co-curating the traveling exhibit transPOP: Korea Viet Nam Remix. Le obtained his MFA from UC Irvine, where he also taught, and is working on his dissertation at USC (Dept. of American Studies & Ethnicity). He has received fellowships from the Fulbright Foundation,Civitella Ranieri Foundation, William Joiner Center, Banff Centre, Fine Arts Work Center, and PEN Center USA. Yong Soon Min is an artist and independent curator. Her artistic practice, inclusive of curatorial projects, incorporates diverse media and processes that engage issues of representation and cultural identity, the intersection of history and memory, and the role of the artist and the arts as agents of social change. Her artwork has been exhibited and reviewed widely since the early 1980s. Recent curatorial projects include an exhibition and tribute for Yiso Bahc, Los Angeles Koreatown history project, and an international exhibition about the Korean diaspora for the Fourth Gwangju Biennial in Korea. She is currently organizing a traveling exhibition that entails the intersection of popular culture and the traumas of history of Korea and Vietnam. She is professor in the Studio Art department at UC Irvine. Leta Ming is an art historian, curator and critic living in Los Angeles. She is currently pursuing her PhD in art history at the University of Southern California in modern and contemporary art, with a focus on 1970s Bay Area conceptual and performance art. Leta was recently awarded a 2007-2008 Predoctoral Travel Fellowship from the Center for Advanced Study in the Visual Arts at the National Gallery of Art. Prior to moving to the West Coast, she lived in New York City, where she was a Helena Rubenstein Curatorial Fellow in the Whitney Museum of American Art Independent Study Program and co-curator of the contemporary art exhibition Social Capital: Forms of Interaction. Also in New York, Leta worked at Christie’s auction house and in private art dealing, specializing in nineteenth and twentieth century painting and sculpture