THE brutality of the war in Syria; the death cult that is Isis; Brexit and the economic and intellectual turmoil unleashed by it. Donald bloody Trump. God help us, the world in 2016 is an unflinchingly grim place, is it not? If only someone would come along and tell us it will all be OK.

Step forward David Shrigley. At first glance the 18-foot high bronze sculpture by the Glasgow-based artist now adorning the Fourth Plinth in London’s Trafalgar Square does exactly that. The piece, called Really Good, depicts that simplest of gestures: a giant thumbs up.

London mayor Sidiq Khan was hilariously quick to take the sculpture at face value. After formally unveiling the piece a few days ago, he told waiting reporters he thought it represented London’s post-Brexit attitude. See, everything’s going to be fine, he smiled. Don’t worry, be happy.

Khan is clearly not a Shrigley or indeed a Partick Thistle fan. If he was either, he would know that in this artist’s world nothing is what it seems. Shrigley, you see, isn’t a “don’t worry, be happy” type of guy. And more than a passing glance at the piece itself, with its strange, elongated, spindly, frankly rather disturbing thumb, it’s distortion of the eponymous Facebook “like” we are all constantly encouraged to bestow on others’ life events, is enough to tell you that this is anything but straightforward feel good art.

In fact, look at this piece for long enough and you’ll likely feel, well, bad. Unsettled, certainly. You may also, of course, end up in peals of laughter. And therein lies the genius of this piece and its creator: his ability to perfectly evoke our own particular kind of modern malaise.

I mention Partick Thistle because Shrigley is, of course, the man behind Kingsley, surely now the most famous football mascot in the world. Where other teams choose cute and cuddly animals to represent them at games and in merchandise, Thistle have what can only be described as an ugly, depressed, angry-looking yellow sun. Being the opposite of cute, he instantly makes you laugh. But at a deeper level Kingsley perhaps represents the ultimate despair inherent in being a supporter of Partick Thistle, a club never likely to achieve European or even national glory. And yet the passion, sometimes the aggression, remains. Kingsley says more about what it’s like to be a football fan than a thousand books or documentaries ever could. In his own feel bad way, Kinglsey makes you feel good.

For 20-odd years Shrigley has been quietly reflecting and undermining the modern world with his gloriously pessimistic, blackly humorous drawings. One of my favourites, which I have pinned on my fridge, depicts a simply drawn, smiling, dead-eyed man licking an ice cream. The motto reads “Life is very good”. This instantly came to mind when I saw this latest sculpture. As did another of his drawings, also on my fridge, featuring a crudely rendered man sitting in the classic Rodin position, hand on chin. “I hate thinking”, say the words going along the top. Hardly a day goes by where these don’t make me chuckle. And that makes art powerful.

Shrigley is, of course, only the latest in a long line of British satirists working across literature, visual art and comedy, from Jonathan Swift and William Hogarth, through Spike Milligan and Monty Python, and more recently, Armando Iannucci, Chris Morris and Banksy, who help reveal the grim absurdities of life. All have the ability to channel feelings of anger, alienation and desolation about the world they live in. But, and this is by far the best bit, they make you laugh too.

I find it comforting to know that artists have always railed against their world, thinking their own age the very worst of times, in a perpetual groundhog day of misery and confusion. Mary Shelley’s novel Frankenstein was an eloquent and disturbing response to the scientific and technological discoveries of the early 1800s, as was Cubism a century later. In the 1940s, as the world was engulfed by war for the second time that century, American artists such as Jackson Pollock and Mark Rothko reacted to the death and destruction with abstract expressionism.

Art, whether it be humorous, as in the case of Hogarth and Iannucci, or profoundly moving, as with Rothko, has always helped us cope with the feelings of anger and futility that afflict every age.

And sitting as it does amid the pomp of British imperialism represented by Trafalgar Square, in its own way Shrigley’s gleefully ugly thumbs up does this too. The work’s joy is, of course, in its bleak absurdity, its simple, effective and humorous distortion of an increasingly meaningless gesture.

With this in mind, Glasgow should immediately commission Shrigley, an adopted son of the city, to create a work of similar scale for permanent display in George Square. That really would be Really Good. I can feel a campaign coming on.