This year-long exchange between a London graffiti artist and council cleaner is hilarious

Ever since this plugged-in planet discovered the perils of smartphone addiction, comical retorts have largely been found on Facebook walls, not brick ones.

Fortunately, for fans of more inventive and artistic humour, one UK urban artist known as M.obstr has shown us where we’re going wrong.

Taking to his Instagram feed to document a year-long repartee battle with a council cleaner over an unassuming brick wall, the resulting banter is truly brilliant. Mundane to any onlooker when viewed in isolation, the graffitist’s humour morphs to adapt to the council worker’s attempts to scrub it out, shifting the veritable goal posts when his work is covered over. We just hope said cleaner had a good sense of humour about it all.

As the artist himself says on his website:

“I cycled past this wall on the way to work for years. I noticed that graffiti painted within the red area was ‘buffed’ with red paint. However, graffiti outside of the red area would be removed via pressure washing. This prompted the start of an experiment. Unlike other works, I was very uncertain as to what results it would yield. Below is what transpired over the course of a year.”