House of Humour and Satire

Worth a detour

Opened on 1 April 1972 — the date was the point — and now holding tens of thousands of cartoons, prints, sculptures, masks and posters by artists from well over a hundred countries. It is a large, odd, very Eastern Bloc institution built on a single running joke about Gabrovo meanness. Worth an hour if you like graphic satire; less if you were expecting to laugh out loud.

Story

Background

Gabrovo's reputation is for thrift, taken to absurd lengths, and the town has spent two centuries leaning into it rather than denying it. The municipal emblem is a cat with no tail. The museum's own emblem is a globe with a cat's ears and eyes. The jokes are affectionate, self-directed and repeated so often that they function as a local industry.

The institution founded on that joke turned out to be more serious than it sounds. Since 1972 it has collected graphic satire internationally on a large scale — cartoons, satirical prints, paintings, sculpture, photography, posters, carnival costume — running to tens of thousands of works by thousands of artists from across the world. Assembling an international collection of political cartooning inside a communist state involved an obvious tension, and the museum navigated it partly by keeping the emphasis on humour as folk tradition. Since 1989 it has been able to be franker about the political half of its own holdings.

As an experience it is uneven. The building is a substantial concrete block, the displays rotate, and a great deal of cartooning does not survive translation or the passage of forty years. But the scale of the thing is genuinely unusual, and the section on Gabrovo's own carnival and joke tradition explains something about Bulgarian humour that no guidebook paragraph manages. The town holds a carnival that draws on the same material.