Baudelaire’s grotesque entertainers are tragic and macabre characters, whose apparent laughter hides a deep malaise. The clown is indeed an “artificial madman” (“The Madman and the Venus”), a divided being who, in pretending madness, ends up cutting himself off from others, himself and Truth. The paradoxes of the clown, mediocre actor and sublime artist, are better understood through the prism of the Baudelairean reflexion on laughter. If, in its various incarnations (buffoon, gypsy, histrionic actor are figures close to each other but whose characteristics differ), the character who pretends madness is an “allegorical respondent to the poet” (J. Starobinski), it is largely because despite his “special graces” he suffers from not being able to get close to Beauty any other way than through mimicking it with risible gestures.