This painting depicts a seated figure with its hand over its mouth as it snickers at the viewer. It's unclear what exactly prompted this laughter, but it is menacing nonetheless. The destabilizing humor emanating from the jester-like subject sparks uneasiness and doubt; the viewer may ask, “What are you laughing at?”

The artist has illuminated the canvas with yellow light and modeled the figure with greens and oranges. There is a strong element of drawing throughout the painting, a quality that suggests a kinship with other artists' work—such as Picasso’s cubist portraits or Picabia’s Transparencies. Amidst the flurry of brushwork in this composition are areas of resolution, including the cracked smile of a jack-o-lantern and a glistening bulging eye.

Hoza’s paintings tend to live between two states, such as sleep and consciousness or humor and horror. The artist's compositions suggest a disquiet or looming event underneath the stillness of a reclining figure. Visible traces of the artist's process in the completed painting adds to this unsettling quality. Ghosts from previous layers creep forward, charging the work with a turbulent effect and playful physicality. These works employ muted grays and explosive primary colors, along with a fragmented spatial quality, that draws from the work of artists such as Edwin Dickinson and the moonlit figures of Edvard Munch. Steadily reworking each painting over time, Hoza’s painted world becomes one of shifting planes and constant realignment. Each image works to express the possibility of meaning through the dissolution of figures within a painted space.