The air is loud with bird calls and insects and the noise of the artist thrashing through the undergrowth. Dressed as a clown, including a pair of ridiculous shoes, Julian Rosefeldt makes his way through the Brazilian rainforest, but for all his efforts keeps returning to the same spot. It’s a closed circuit, shown on three giant screens at the Hayward Gallery’s new exhibition, Laughing in a Foreign Language. Near Rosefeldt’s projection, another pair of clown boots hang by their laces from an oversized, cartoonish nail. This is by Swiss artist Ugo Rondinone. What a subtle and witty bit of installing. Clowns, curator Mami Kataoka tells us in the exhibition catalogue, are “symbols for duality, for laughter and melancholy”. I would never have guessed.

The banalities have barely begun. The exhibition opens with a pile of oversized soft toy animals. The Korean artist, Gimhongsok, would have us believe that this is a group of illegal Mexican immigrants, lying doggo in their plush suits. He would also like us to think that his work is about political and social issues, while he has a jibe at other artists, such as Santiago Sierra. This is embarrassing, arch and not at all amusing. Neither is Stanya Khan, dressed as a bloody-nosed valkyrie and carrying a wedge of fake cheese, talking drivel to the camera as she wanders around LA. Nor is the man in a tuxedo who would like us to shake hands with him, though he’s got a fist full of emulsion paint. People who fall for this performance piece are really sad.

Of course, a show about humour doesn’t have to be funny. This exhibition is billed as exploring the role of laughter and humour in contemporary art; there is a great show to be made on the subject. This isn’t it. Almost none of the best artists in the field are here - no Maurizio Cattelan, no Eric van Lieshout, no Elmgreen & Dragset, no Paul Noble, no Irwin Wurm, no Sarah Lucas. No Bill Viola, and he’s always good for a laugh. I didn’t laugh once, not even at David Shrigley’s drawings. (I’d like a break from Shrigley.)

But let’s not nitpick. The real problem here is the orange carpet, the sound leakage from one work to another, the fact that you have to get on your knees to read the lengthy texts accompanying Barthйlйmy Toguo’s photographs. They are essential to the Cameroonian artist’s stories about his misadventures at border controls with his solid wood suitcases, his cartridge belt stuffed with chocolate bars, his wooden hard-hat and his failure to carry the right visas. Toguo is one of the best things here.

First I felt disappointed, then glum, and finally depressed. While the Hayward seems to want us to think of this as a jolly and accessible show by a roster of wacky international artists, the curatorial intention appears to have been altogether darker. No one was laughing on the two visits I made - except on one occasion, when a gallery attendant stifled a guffaw at something another invigilator had whispered in her ear. Maybe he was asking her out. At the sound of her laughter, everyone in the gallery spun around, hoping their long search for one of the rib-tickling moments they felt they had been promised was at an end.

This could have been an exhibition about humour as transgression. It could have been about art as a witty reaction to linguistic and cultural misunderstanding, as a defence against difference and the terrors of otherness, as a comment on the flatness of a globalised multinational culture and against the fake profundities of the art market - but it’s not that either, though at various points it tries to be.

Bulgarian Nedko Solakov’s feeble graffiti, often making play of the wall’s shadows and imperfections, are inane. Janne Lehtinen’s arty photographs of his sidesplitting attempts to fly fail to be funny in any language.

Peter Land, we are told, “plays the clown, without the make-up or the funny clothes” - and, I might add, without the humour, or that clownish melancholy we’ve heard so much about. The artist stands on a New York corner, his suitcase bearing the words “I’m new around here, so please don’t rob me, mug me or kill me” - a joke about Danish preconceptions of America. In the exhibition catalogue, Hayward director Ralph Rugoff tells us about how artists share doubts about our preconceptions of them. Those pesky preconception-challenging artists are at it again! I expect they’ll be challenging us to laugh at their jokes next. Really, this won’t do. And it’s no good saying that all this is supposed to be painful or unfunny, that even humour here is being subverted.

One or two works, such as Marcus Coates’s Journey to the Lower World, in which the artist conjures animal spirits in front of an audience of housewives in a Liverpool high-rise, and Makoto Aida’s video of himself as a wasted Bin Laden hanging out in Japan have made me laugh before in other shows. But they don’t work in the same way the second time round. Or perhaps it’s the context - it’s all so forced. Other works here left me with a different sense of dйjа vu: Rosefeldt’s clown movie operates on the same principle as Rodney Graham’s well-known and vastly superior film Vexation Island, while Jake and Dinos Chapman’s version of Hogarth’s A Rake’s Progress etchings treat us to the same gag as their earlier reworkings of Goya, giving the characters disturbing new physiognomies reminiscent of Bill Nighy’s squid-faced sailor in the Pirates of the Caribbean movies. The Chapmans have done better, nastier, crueller things.Only John Bock’s new road movie Palms exudes the right madness, ultra-violence and nonsensical dialogue.

One artwork on display is a stool in the form of a human figure, crouching on the floor and facing the wall. A gallery attendant is supposed to use this as a seat, while a recording inside the stool reads out the names of London Underground stations in a Japanese accent. This is a wasted opportunity. If the recording were of obscene remarks or anonymous insults, they might provoke hilarious misunderstandings and even violent altercations. These could spread throughout the gallery, escalating into a mass orgy of slapstick fisticuffs, eye gouging, biting and kicking, up into the exhibition of Rodchenko’s photographs and out along the South Bank. Who knows where it might end? Instead, it’s just a muffled recitation of Tube stops.

This is marginally preferable to the witless gags that Doug Fishbone has recorded on electronic joke machines mounted on the gallery walls. There are jokes about Jews, nationality, sex and all sorts of 10th-hand tasteless ribaldry, all delivered in a mild voice. “You laugh even when you know you shouldn’t,” the catalogue says of Fishbone’s work. No, you don’t.

Fishbone’s art is routinely dependent on overstepping the mark. So, too, is Olaf Breuning’s film Home 2, in which a slack-jawed tourist, a sort of cut-price Alan Partridge-meets-Borat, finds himself adrift in various impoverished parts of the world, where he makes excruciating comments about the locals. Expressing horror at the sight of African kids scavenging on a rubbish dump, he starts throwing around $20 bills. One discovers with some relief that the whole thing has been set up. But unlike Borat’s victims, these people don’t deserve any of this treatment - and nor do we.

Laughing in a Foreign Language is at the Hayward Gallery, London SE1, until April 13. Details: «www.southbankcentre.co.uk»

Shambo, the Hindu temple bullock, will be taken away for slaughter shortly after dawn tomorrow after a legal battle to save him ended in failure.

The Skanda Vale temple warned officials that they would have to interrupt an act of worship to retrieve the six-year-old Friesian from a locked temple.

On Monday, the court of appeal ruled that the Welsh assembly government was right to order Shambo’s slaughter after he tested positive for bovine tuberculosis.

The court also refused the Hindu community leave to appeal to the House of Lords.

Today they were told he is to be destroyed at 8am tomorrow, almost three months after testing positive for exposure to bovine TB.

“The Welsh assembly government are coming to kill Shambo tomorrow at 8am,” Skanda Vale’s website announced today.

Shambo, whose movements are recorded on a webcam, has attracted worldwide attention. His fate has provoked a heated debate over the state’s right to interfere to protect public health in the face of religious objections. Thousands have signed a petition to save him.

The animal was first ordered to be slaughtered in May when the bovine TB infection was detected through a standard skin test.

Until today, however, Hindu leaders had remained hopeful that the sacred bullock would escape its fate.

“Up to the point when it was confirmed to me now, I think everybody was hoping that it just wouldn’t happen,” a spokesman for the Hindu Forum of Britain said.

“We were hoping that by showing Shambo around, somebody somewhere might intervene and act to prevent this.”

One of the religious community’s monks, Brother Alex, said they would not let anyone take Shambo away without a warrant.

“They will have to come back with their warrant and, no doubt, their gang of thugs,” he said.

Another monk, Brother Michael, said: “They will have to physically desecrate a temple to get him. He’s locked here and we will be having an act of worship in front of where he is.

“If the Welsh assembly government want to take him out of there they will have to interrupt an act of worship.”

Doug Odom, a deputy sheriff with Contra Costa County, rapped loudly on the front door of a one-story prefabricated home in Brentwood, just off a dirt road where horses grazed.

“Sheriff’s office, come to the door,” he called.

After a moment, the door swung open to reveal a middle-aged woman in a red T-shirt and blue jeans.

“We’re doing the eviction,” Odom told her. “Are you ready to go? … I need you to get your shoes, purse, whatever you need to get and come outside now.”

The woman’s shoulders slumped. “Can you wait, like, 24 hours?” she asked.

“We’re going to have to do the eviction now,” Odom replied as he and his partner, Deputy Sheriff Alex Custodio, followed her inside. A Realtor and two locksmiths waited outside to reclaim the house, which had reverted to the lender, Option One Mortgage Corp., at a foreclosure auction in December.

Such scenes are increasingly common as an ever-growing number of households default on their mortgages and fall into foreclosure.

Once a bank repossesses a house, it wants a vacant property that can be sold quickly. If homeowners don’t leave voluntarily, banks go to court to get an eviction order. The sheriff’s office has the grim task of enforcing those orders.

In Contra Costa, the Bay Area county with the most foreclosures, deputies do 45 evictions a week, up 30 percent from last year, according to Custodio. The sheriff’s department gets $125 per foreclosure, a rate set by the state that only partly offsets the cost.

Foreclosures are as location-dependent as everything in real estate. Overall, the Bay Area has had fewer than other regions nationwide. But the situation is starkly worse in outlying pockets, such as the Contra Costa neighborhoods where the deputies do evictions.

In eastern Antioch, 4.1 percent of all homes and condos went through foreclosure in 2007, according to DataQuick Information Systems. That’s as bad as the hardest-hit neighborhood of Stockton - often cited as the foreclosure capital of California and even the nation.

In eastern Contra Costa, more than 2 percent of all homes in eight ZIP codes were foreclosed on in 2007, a rate that rivals most Stockton neighborhoods. Two-person team kept busy

In Contra Costa, a rotating two-person team of deputies does evictions three days a week, with a grueling schedule to cover a vast geographic territory.

“We have one every 15 minutes including drive time,” said Custodio, who has been doing evictions for four years. On Tuesday, the Brentwood eviction was the duo’s fifth call of the day; they had an additional dozen scheduled afterward.

Until recently, the vast majority were of tenants who fell behind on their rent. Only 10 percent were foreclosures. Now one-third are foreclosures. That comes to about 720 foreclosure evictions a year, or just under one-fifth of the 4,000 Contra Costa homes that went into foreclosure in 2007.

Not all foreclosures lead to an eviction; many former homeowners move out before it gets to that point. Often the lender pays them a couple of thousand dollars to move out by a certain date. But some people stay until the last moment, hoping against hope to hang on to their homes.

People get plenty of warning during the foreclosure process, which takes from six to 12 months. Then they get a “notice to vacate” from the sheriff at least six days before the eviction date.

“There are a few who are holdouts,” Custodio said. “I try to be as courteous as possible; allow them to gather a few things, a toothbrush.”

Still, the deputies draw their guns before entering a seemingly vacant residence. Talking to avoid trouble

“We have some where they tell you they’re not going anywhere,” Odom said. “You talk and reason with them. Most people, when they get the understanding that their other option is to be arrested and go to jail” agree to leave voluntarily.

A whole crew assembles for evictions. There are the two deputies in a patrol car - they take a “cage unit” car in case they have to arrest someone for refusing to vacate. At each property, they are met by the owner or a representative. When it’s a foreclosure, that generally means a Realtor or property manager hired by the bank. Often, the owner also arranges for a locksmith to be there to rekey the property or to gain entry if necessary.

The deputies will not kick in a door. “It is not the sheriff’s office policy to destroy property, unless it’s an exigent circumstance,” Custodio said.

Odom, who has been on eviction patrol for just a few months after nine years as a county patrol officer, had already witnessed a particularly dramatic incident with a foreclosed homeowner.

“We had one where we thought nobody was there,” he said. “The locksmith was working on changing the locks. Then a guy came to the screen door - he had slit his wrists and had blood running down both arms. He said let him alone to die in peace.”

After calling for police backup, Odom was able to persuade the man to get in an ambulance to go to the hospital. His injuries turned out not to be serious.

“It was more for dramatic effect,” Odom said. “He had owned the house 10 or 15 years and he was depressed (to be losing it). He wasn’t violent. I tried to explain to him that life goes on; this is a bad thing, but it’s not worth killing yourself over.”

Both deputies said the Brentwood eviction was comparatively easy.

“She was pretty agreeable,” Odom said. “It went pretty smoothly.”

Odom had already been to the Brentwood house a week earlier and served former owner Ellen Anderson, the woman in the T-shirt, with a warning notice of the eviction date.

Back in January, Dori Anderson (no relation to Ellen Anderson), a Realtor with Cypress Lakes Realty hired by Option One to sell the house, had met with Ellen Anderson and offered her “cash for keys” - a payment of $2,500 to be out within a month. Dori Anderson said the woman asked for three months time to move, which the bank would not grant.

On the day of the eviction, Ellen Anderson was only partially packed up when the deputies arrived a little before noon. A fire burned in the freestanding stove. Papers were stacked on the floor; cooking utensils and food were scattered around the kitchen.

Anderson collapsed onto a couch after letting in Odom and Custodio, who kept up a series of questions: “Is there anyone else in the house?” “Are there any weapons in the house?” “Are you waiting for a ride?” She answered “no” to each question - until they asked if she had been drinking that day. Anderson responded that she had had a couple of beers.

“Do you mind if I take a look at your eyes?” the deputy said. “If you’re going to drive, I want to make sure you’re all right.”

Looking distraught, Anderson apologized for the mess. She said she and her husband are getting a divorce and couldn’t make the monthly payment, which had risen to $4,500.

“Yes, it’s a tough situation for a lot of people,” Odom replied. “Where are your keys at? Let’s starting working on getting your keys, your wallet, your purse, all that. You’ll have 15 days from today to come back and get the rest of your stuff.” House returns to company

Odom went to the front door and taped a “Notice of restoration” outside, indicating that the house now belonged to Option One. The deputies keep a copy and give another copy to the new owner.

Ellen Anderson collected an armful of DVDs.

“My divorce cannot come through soon enough,” she said. She said her soon-to-be-ex husband had already moved out to another house in Concord the couple had bought together.

She gestured at the kitchen ceiling. “This … all leaks,” she said. “You can’t get refinanced because it’s a manufactured home. It’s 20 years old. They don’t last.”

The couple bought the house about 10 years ago, she said. Ellen Anderson said she has been a stay-at-home mom of four kids, now ages 13 to 26. Her husband does drywall installation.

Dori Anderson, the Realtor, put a hand on Ellen Anderson’s shoulder. “Legally, I have to rekey the doors,” she said. “While (the locksmith) is rekeying, you go in and take what you need to take; get your toothbrush, pack a suitcase.”

“What do I do?” Ellen Anderson asked, almost rhetorically. “I’m going to try to rent a place, but my divorce isn’t final. Today I guess I’ll go down to Martinez with my parents.” Foreclosure breeding ground

Eviction duty has given the deputy sheriffs an up-close and personal look at the fallout from the subprime crisis.

In Contra Costa, many of the foreclosure evictions are in the new subdivisions that sprang up in recent years. Prices in those subdivisions rose rapidly during the real estate boom days but now have fallen almost as rapidly. In places such as Antioch, Pittsburg and Discovery Bay, homes that went for $650,000 a couple of years ago are now selling for $450,000 or so.

People who bought those homes with no money down now owe more than their home is worth. That, combined with adjustable mortgages resetting to higher rates, is a breeding ground for foreclosure.

Most struggling homeowners try to sell, but they’re competing with the lower prices banks offer on already-foreclosed homes.

“Look at this block,” Custodio said, gesturing at a subdivision of cookie-cutter houses in Pittsburg. “You can see all those for-sale signs. More than likely, we’ll be out here posting them” for a notice of eviction.

Custodio has seen the role real estate speculation played in fueling the foreclosures.

“In talking to some people (being evicted) they tried to buy other property; they tried to add to their wealth by owning,” he said. “People tried to capitalize on the boom when values were skyrocketing.”

Still, he doesn’t fault them.

“Most folks are decent people,” he said. “They just wanted a little more, but it didn’t work out for them. Hopefully things will get better for folks.”

– For a video of Contra Costa sheriff’s deputies performing evictions, go to sfgate.com/business.Foreclosure timeline

Default: When a homeowner falls about 90 days behind on mortgage payments, the lender sends a notice of default.

Notice of trustee sale: Three months (or more) after the notice of default, the lender can announce that it is putting the property up for auction. It must give at least 21 days’ notice.

Auction: Foreclosure properties are auctioned on county courthouse steps, generally for the amount owed on the mortgage. Sales are all cash and as is. Most homes revert to the lender at auction. Then, a trustee’s deed is filed with the county certifying the new owner.

Eviction: If the former homeowner does not move out, the new owner can get a court eviction order. Deputy sheriffs then serve a notice to vacate and return six days later for the eviction. The person is evicted and a “notice of restoration” is posted. The former occupant has 15 days to reclaim possessions. Resources

Here are some places homeowners facing foreclosure can turn for assistance:

Your bank: Lenders stress that homeowners should contact them if they anticipate trouble making their mortgage payments. Ask to speak to the workout department about a loan modification or forbearance.

Homeownership Preservation Foundation: This nonprofit offers free foreclosure-avoidance counseling and assistance contacting lenders. (888) 995-4673; links.sfgate.com/ZMV.

HUD-approved housing counseling agencies: The U.S. Department of Housing and Urban Development sponsors housing counseling agencies throughout the country that offer advice at little or no cost. links.sfgate.com/ZMW.

Source: Chronicle research

E-mail Carolyn Said at csaid@sfchronicle.com.