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The use of humor is strongly restricted in the field of political discourse, especially during a presidential election campaign. Beyond the manifestos and parties, the first-past-the-post voting system and universal franchise lead the candidates to an all-out war of image. François Hollande, challenger to the incumbent president, thus needed to construct his own credibility. This study shows how he corrects his pre-existing ethos of “Mr Witty”, redeploying his humor as a highly controlled means of attack. By drawing contrastively on the case of Nicolas Sarkozy, and historically on that of François Mitterrand, we look into the conditions for the successful use of humor in politics. These are shown to depend on a set of contextual factors in which the discursive ethos reworks the pre-existing ethos and in which the speaker is constantly negotiating for position in respect of his competitors. Such an approach shows how solidarity can in practice be found between rhetoric and pragmatics.