Rabelais was ambitiously experimental and extremely self-conscious about structure, style and use of language. His comedy is inseparable from his linguistic inventiveness. Traditional historians of rhetoric have found prompts for his approach in humanist rhetoric. Later students of rhetoric shifted our understanding from source-based analysis to the notion of intertexuality, a textuality without an author and an emphasis on language and linguistic performance.  While that shift has been a fruitful development in Rabelais studies (starting no doubt with Rigolot’s Les langages de Rabelais), it nonetheless obscured some rhetorical relationships which deserve to be re-considered.  What relationship, for instance, exists between descriptive rhetoric (for example, the study of the figures of speech), communicative rhetoric (a study of the effects of such figures in speech and writing) and ethical rhetoric (the study of the desired action or attitude that emerges from reading a text in the light of such figures of speech)?  How are such rhetorics – in the plural – articulated together? What new approaches to rhetoric are there (e.g. cognitive) which might offer a different perspective from those developed in the twentieth century? Is there a rhetoric of laughter in Rabelais? How would such a rhetoric in Rabelais differ from or relate to the rhetorical techniques exploited by other comic writers?