Cartoon and animation duo Jon Link and Mick Bunnage, better known by their joint name Modern Toss, have been delivering their dry brand of humour to the nation for 20 years. To mark the occasion, they’re staging a free, Kickstarter-funded exhibition during the Brighton Dome Comedy Festival that they’re planning to tour next year.

“We’ve been wanting to do an exhibition for a while,” Link explains. “The last one we did was behind closed doors in May 2020, and didn’t feel quite the same without people looking and laughing at it.”

However, don’t expect to see any old white cube experience. Instead, he says the show will be “a bit like being in a Toss amusement arcade”.

The exhibition will include a mixture of new and old work, along with a slew of ‘token operated interactive exhibits’ befitting of its seaside location. These include sound exhibits evoking a Drive By Abuser and another revolving around an interview with a crumb.

The duo’s Periodic Table of Swearing will be there too, which is being brought to life with the help of a 60-piece choir who will perform all 102 elements of the Periodic Table of Swearing during an event at the weekend.

It also presents their Flies of the British Isles project, “which features over 300 new identified species including The Crawley Wall Pervert, Skelton Speed Honker, Whitstable Scat Bat, M6 Lorry Cab Mate and many more,” Link explains. “We were going to use real flies, but they fell apart when we tried to pin them onto a board, so instead we hand-sculpted 300 life-size flies out of clay and wire.”

Sculpture appears in another exhibit: a set of 3D-scanned sculptures based on stones that a friend spotted on Brighton Beach, who noticed they looked like Modern Toss characters. “We’re calling them the Toss Spirit Stone Series,” Link says. “They’ve proved very popular already, as one got briefly stolen from the car park outside the studio while it was drying. Luckily I found it in the back of someone’s car and got it back.”

Aside from the main exhibition, there will be a portrait booth where participants can get their portrait drawn by the duo, plus there’s a one-off Late Night Cartoon Showing followed by a Q&A with Link. “We’ve selected some prime cuts of our animation, live action and short films and sliced them together to see what they look like,” he explains. “A new curation of clips, never seen together, just for a laugh.”

Much has changed in the 20 years since they started Modern Toss, which has inevitably shaped how their work is made and shared. “In 2004, social media didn’t really exist, people were passing round the cartoons by email at work and everything was in print, so a lot has changed.” However, their intentions have remained much the same. “We’re always seeking to expand the Toss world, which always involves listening and looking at people when you’re out and about.”

Modern Toss: The First 8000 Days runs at the Brighton Dome Comedy Festival from October 25 – 30; brightondome.org