A title that for the first time takes up the relation between the medium and amusement, swinging between deliberately ironic images and others that are simply odd. It is an attempt to examine the history of the medium from a particular standpoint, the comic: although many scholars stubbornly deny it, work that makes us smile exists, and great authors and millions of ordinary users have practised it. The author follows the thread of the relation between an image and the comic — when laughter arises and what form it takes, when it stops at simple humour and when instead it pushes as far as the grotesque. "The medium has what it takes to set off the Freudian mechanism of the joke," he writes, "but if comic work amuses us, it becomes magnificent when it ventures into the territory of the ridiculous, that is to say the comic that does not know it is comic." The book is built in two parts, a short history of the smile and a set of visual slips.