From fart jokes to Jerry Lewis, humor is best when it catches us off guard, nailing something embarrassing, something ridiculous, something disturbing, something outrageous – we laugh before we catch ourselves, before politeness or intellect kicks in. Comedy, with its theatrical slant, its psychotic bent, its scatological or slapstick form, and its often deeply absurd aspect, provides a release and also a kind of mirror for our psyches. In Allston Skirt Gallery’s admittedly Boy-ish, all-guy summer group show “Pull My Finger,” artist Joe Zane brings together seven visual artists whose work in media including painting, sculpture, photography, video, and puppetry engages humor in a variety of ways, and incorporates work made over the course of several decades, operating as a small essay on the recent history of art and comedy.

Non sequitur, naivety and infantilism give early drawings by pioneering video and performance artist Michael Smith a funny twist – the question of funny ha ha v. funny weird has remained an open one in Smith’s work for decades.

A 1980s video of artist Joe Gibbons turning the tables on genre-jumping artist/entertainer Spalding Gray during an unscripted interview blur the lines between performance and reality.

Tony Matelli’s brand new, meticulously constructed sculpture of a ridiculously low-brow vegetable guy messes with art’s pretensions, and ties fine art directly with our gross basic human urges… like building funny people out of stupid stuff.

Jason Schiedel’s slapstick video continues the low-brow tradition of art and entertainment, as the acrobatic artist hurls himself through video-space like a cartoon character.

Idiosyncratic puppeteer John Bell contributes a slapstick character – raising once again the question of our urge to create goofy or pathetic stand-ins for ourselves.

Carl Ostendarp’s painting extends his wonderful inquiry into the language of humor – and its visual POW!

Photographs by David Robbins play with the physical and psychological structure of comedy, notably in a strobelike portrait of Jerry Lewis’ famous mug. Pun intended.

In “Pull My Finger,” intersections between art and entertainment, painting and performance, and sculpture and TV come to the surface. The line between performance and reality gets uncomfortably blurred, as do the lines between control and out-of-control, fear and pleasure.