Alphonse Allais considered himself an author for traveling clerks. His good words have been peddled from thick pun to cynical reflections and absurd considerations. Yet it was a great writer who created every moment. André Breton gave justice to his black humor, while Umberto Eco studied it as one of the masters of the story. By publishing To twist, his first collection, a collection of classics makes him enter the Hall of Letters and consecrates the first comic of the nineteenth century.

Alphonse Allais, master of black humor and hoax, expert in the art of pushing the logic of the absurd until the burst of laughter, was the most fanciful writer of the Belle Epoque and the forerunner of famous comic authors. To twist, as the name suggests, is obviously not a collection of sad news! You are sick, your doctor arrives. It palpates you, examines you, questions you, all that while thinking of something else. When he has made his order, he says to you, I will come again, and you may be quiet when he goes back until you are past. If you resist for a long time the disease and especially the drugs, the good doctor rubs his hands, because his little visits snowball and eventually constitute a nice sum.