The single most audible quality of Dada is its ringing laughter, without which the formation, quite literally, would not have been heard above the din of war. As emphasis has fallen on laughter as intellectual activity, we read of the unguarded moment as that in which humour rebounds upon the subject and the laugh laughs at itself. Indeed, the potential of laughter's historical obtaining of deep philosophical meaning has been thoroughly deliberated, described by Bakhtin as ‘one of the essential forms of the truth concerning the world as a whole’, and now the critical force of humour is to be discovered in the way in which it will make us laugh and then call us into question through that same laughter. Following laughter into more current thought, Deleuze has posited its diametric opposition to ‘the whole tragedy of interiority’, always referring to an exterior movement of intensities and of intensive qualities. The cynical and loudly laughing posture adopted by the Dadaists is crucial in completing the revised readings of the 1916 formation as presented in this book, as from the great cynic rises his own self-denunciation; and as from that self-denunciation there emerges a form that deterritorialises and ‘goes elsewhere’. Cynicism is exercised as its own antagonist and, in Diogenes of Sinope (the Dada prototype from antiquity), it is manifestly kynicism read properly and politically as resistance and as a counterstrategy, the vital current of Dada. As a staging of ‘behaviour’, cynicism gives a new twist to the question of how to say the truth, and we find in Diogenes’ wilful abandonment of public protocol the initiation of a laughter containing philosophical truth and illumination of the complex relation between the object (the individual and the social) and the laughter that erupts from it. It is precisely such complexity that gives rise to laughter's multiplicity of meanings, and it is the explosive politics of the body in its dismissal of self-deluding notions of self-identity that gives us, finally, its specific variability.