When Charles Baudelaire wrote his famous essay “Of the Essence of Laughter” from which the main title of our chapter is taken, he unambiguously identified the wise man as the Christian sage “who is filled with the spirit of the Lord”. Standing at the threshold of modernity, Baudelaire looks back upon history to identify another threshold when the world not only became Christian but also comic. In a brilliant move, Baudelaire introduces yet another defining threshold into the problem of laughter. Baudelaire notes that the object of laughter is precisely the one who is unaware of being caught in a contradiction. Christianity had to deal with the inconsistency of its own divine logic of the Incarnate Word because logically it would lead to the death of Christ as the death of God as Beyond.