The gentle humor and playfulness of this extraordinary vessel shine across the ages and across cultural boundaries. This comic fellow with his distended cheeks and protruding ears, whose head once contained an offering of food or drink, charms us. It has been suggested that he is chewing coca leaves, a stimulant still popular in Peru today. Certainly it seems to have kept him wide-awake through the centuries. A masterpiece of Moche ceramic art, at once observant of life and elegantly abstract.