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The city can serve as a backdrop, theme, and motif. It also shelters laughter and provokes laughter. In terms of our knowledge about the specificity of both artistic and cultural media in their discourse on the city, urban history is still a work in progress. Humor is a particularly sensitive tool for studying social changes and is a powerful vehicle for understanding transformations. During the 19th and 20th centuries, the city itself was the subject of these transformations and the mean of their primary spatial expression. The hypothesis of a laughter of the great modern city, of industrial society, can thus be envisioned. This laughter about and in the city finds new objects, born of a new environment, and goes along, at least until the current digital revolution, with the frenzied and perpetual conversion to urban modernity. This issue of Histoire Urbaine aims to describe this process.