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Today, no one remembers that the camouflet – before it was reduced to its current figurative sense of insult36 – was a simple tavern prank. An engraving by Nicolas Dupuis after Charles Cochin entitled Le Camouflet allows us to rediscover this mischief that consisted in blowing thick smoke into the nose of someone sleeping with the aid of a burning paper cone. The various representations to which the camouflet gave rise in the 17th and 18th centuries bear witness to its practice and allow us to follow its history from the cabarets attended by Nicolas Regnier up to the bed in which Jean Honoré Fragonard’s little cupids surprise a young sleeping woman, along the way passing by the study rooms of the apprentice writers of Jean Oudart de Richesource. These representations question the quality of carefree laughter that becomes sardonic, of a slight criticism that becomes cruel and of a pleasantry that shifts from kindly to disagreeable. They accompany an evolution of morals that no longer permits letting go in public, or at least, no longer wants to see it. The exercise of farce becomes more demanding, and the sophistication of common practices prefers verbal violence to physical violence. This explains the slow disappearance of the camouflet of practical jokers that barely survives on the brink of the 19th century except in the countryside.