The laughter of women rings throughout Bolivian brothels. Prostitutes are mistresses of a particular type of humour, especially bawdy, that they commonly use unconditionally. Its recurrence, coding and practice has erected it to a true corporate art learnt collectively along with other tricks of the trade. It acts as a panacea by making less traumatic these women’s transgressions and the public image of their activity. Humour is a cruel device levelled against their clients to cheapen their perceived power of money and the dominance of their sexuality. Based on an ethnography led in popular local brothels in the andine city of Potosi, this paper examines how this type of humour functions in the construction of women’s experience as prostitutes and their social relationships by considering laughter as a way of resisting, but also of preserving, relations of domination. It also questions the anthropologist’s impossible neutrality : to laugh or not to laugh along with or at the subjects being studied shows firmly what side one stands.