Given Duchamp’s lifelong passion for wordplay, as is already manifested in his early humoristic drawings, I take this love as a decisive factor in the way he “found” his readymades. Another factor I find in articles and illustrations in popular magazines of the time that provide a context in which his works originated. My attempts to reconstruct this context result in another view on the nature of Duchamp’s artistic calling than the still prevailing views of the conceptual 60ties and 70ties and the postmodern 80ties.