Manuel de Lima (1915–1976), violinist, painter and music critic, began his writing career in 1944 with the long short-story Um Homem de Barbas [ A man with a beard]. It was the middle of the Second World War and the Salazar dictatorship was well established in officially neutral Portugal. A few years before the belated emergence of Portuguese surrealism, to which he was linked, and in the midst of the development of neorealism, a protest movement followed mainly by the young writers of the time, Manuel de Lima asserted himself from the outset as a very singular writer. Um Homem de Barba is a narrative of a love triangle that ends with the spectacular disappearance of the three protagonists. In this first work placed under the sign of the absurd, which mixes satire, marvelous, and burlesque and in which, according to Almada Negreiros' 1944 preface, the author uses realism to "undo realism", we will study the place and role of humor, as well as the various devices used.