“Merrily dancing tears” is how Paul Klee once described his art. Klee’s description sheds light not only on his own work but also on the difficulty and pathos of art making, a process that is at once an exposure of the artist’s deepest feelings and an at tempt to transform those feelings into something meaningful, and perhaps entertaining, to others.

A watercolor and a few early etchings by Klee are among the nearly 70 pieces by artists such as Arnold Bocklin, Karl Valentin, Emile Nolde, Alfred Kubin, Lyonel Feininger, Max Ernst, and George Grosz included in the show “Comic Grotesque: Wit and Mockery in German Art, 1870-1940” at the Neue Galerie. The exhibition is as provocative and visually fresh as it is convincing and entertaining. The title “Comic Grotesque,” which explores the various meanings of the word “grotesque,” from distorted and exaggerated to ugly and obscene to odd and unknown, will certainly bring in the crowds, and I do not think that they will be disappointed, especially if they bring their German dictionaries.

These are works in a tradition that go at least as far back as the frightening yet beautiful 15th-century woodcuts depicting “The Dance of Death.” But Pamela Kort, the show’s curator, has thrown a wide net over the theme of humor and the grotesque. The exhibition – of paintings, drawings, sculpture, prints, puppets, and films – includes some key Dada works of graphic design. Among them are pieces by Thomas Theodor Heine, John Heartfield, Julius Klinger, and Hannah Hoch. Of special interest are the famous anti-Nazi works of Heartfield and the “Simplicissimus” works by Heine.

The key figure in this body of work is the late-19th-century painter Arnold Bockin, whose paintings – dreamy seascapes and landscapes, part Symbolist Gustave Moreau, part bizarre academic melodrama – are filled with sirens, mermaids, and centaurs. Though Bockin’s paintings are fueled by Romantic fantasy, a sense of foreboding in them is never far behind. Bockin influenced de Chirico and Surrealism, but also a number of later major German artists.

The show opens with some of Bockin’s works, and they set the stage not only for the exhibition’s theme but also for the strange works that come later. These include paintings that merge man and mountain by Emile Nolde, Goyaesque piping fauns by Franz von Stuck, and Alfred Kubin’s wonderful creatures (ancestors, seemingly, of Maurice Sendak’s). They also prepare us for Lyonel Feininger’s street scene, “The White Man” (1907), in which a Tom Wolfe-looking character in a white suit, a giant stickman, is compressed like an accordion by the painting’s top and bottom frame. Max Klinger’s “Pissing Death” (c. 1880) depicts a skeleton standing on a desolate shore urinating into the water.

Some of the best works in the show are the Dada graphic design from the Cabaret Voltaire, which fill vitrines and are hung in frames salon-style. Here – especially in montage collages by Hugo Ball, Raoul Hausmann, Erwin Blumenfeld, and Hannah Hoch – it becomes clear that the Dadaists, no matter how absurd or “grotesque” they made their work, rarely relinquished beauty, order, and structure.

The only problem with this show is cultural distance. American viewers, seeing the works – especially the posters, periodicals, handbills, and films, which are all in German – without the aid of the catalog essays, may feel they are seeing mere artifacts from another time and place, rather than artworks. Consequently, they may come away feeling as if the joke is on them.

But when you realize that the 70-year span of the show’s theme, from 1870 to 1940, is not arbitrary – instead, it follows the humorous grotesque in Germany from its beginnings, when “degenerate” foreign influence was first denounced, through its reemergence in Dada to its formal vilification in the 1937 exhibition of “Degenerate Art” mounted by the Nazis – the sense of foreboding in the works feels real, not imagined. The humor is double-edged, and the grotesque has the element of the prophetic.

For me, one of the great surprises of the show was the wonderful film work of vaudeville performer Karl Valentin. Considered to be one of the first performance artists, Valentin – “Munich’s skinniest comedian” – became both actor and prop in his performances, which are as funny as they are disturbing. Extremely spindly, lithe, self-mocking, and absurd, Valentin made silent films (some of which were banned), in which he is a caricature of just about every kind of man – from professor to musician to athlete to the poverty-stricken.

Valentin reminds me in some ways of Buster Keaton. But Valentin is more on edge and less lovable. And when he becomes almost abstract – closer to an object than a human being – there is something especially frightening and real about him that moves him from the entertaining to the prophetic. Absurd as he is, his work, which vacillates between the grotesque and the visionary, seems right on time. “The more horrifying this world becomes,” Klee wrote, “the more art becomes abstract.”