In this work, the relevance of caricature, both in modern literary and plastic discourses, is considered in two moments: during the first half of the XVIII century, in the interaction between William Hogarth and Henry Fielding, concurrent to the beginnings of the English novel, and in mid XIX century, when Charles Baudelaire, especially in his essay De l essence du rire et généralement du comique dans les arts plastiques, reapproaches the subject. Caricature received from Hogarth and Fielding a negative definition, but still showed a path to the modern experience, by assimilating low and high themes in art, by taking subjects from urban life and by emphasizing the psychology of characters (in the spirit of Locke s empiricism), through an exploration of the human face. Baudelaire s ideas give rise to an esthetics of caricature, built up from his concepts of significative and absolute comic. This caricatural mode, we believe, was already present in Hogarth s modern moral scenes. We take Ernst Gombrich s definition of caricature as an innovation in pictorial art. According to him, the Italian technique was allowed a freedom of experimentation which led to the nontrivial discovery of how to create the illusion of life without the illusion of reality. The arguments in Hogarth and Baudelaire describe the historical relevance of graphic humor, both as a challenge to artistic representation and as a central element of a certain kind of experience of modernity.