The comic is crucial to every culture: mocking established values, transcending the boundaries of morals and proprieties, dodging the laws of accepted logic.Already in the Corinthian black-figure vase-painting of the 7th century, comic images hold an important position. Detlev Wannagat analyses their typology and visual strategies, starting from the grotesquely shaped ‘padded dancers’, in which the original performative context of the festival and its alienation appears the most clearly.