The FF button is often a porn viewer's best friend, but anyone uses it during this tape, her/his fingers should be hacked off. Box of Laughter: Dueling Pages is a brilliant video, a phenomenal work of art. Moving and sexy, it contains the element missing from so much adult material: a strong sense of humor.

Dueling Pages begins with a 20-minute vignette of two chalk-white city girls dressed up like Betty Page, trying on an extensive inventory of garments: panties, corsets, girdles, fishnets, pointy bustiers, hook skirts, and stiletto heels. The scene shifts between the two damsels fawning over each other and talking in exaggerated girly tones about what to wear, to a dominant Betty tickling the shit out of a submissive Betty, all the action occurring on an optically-challenging zebra print rug. A handheld camera beautifully tracks their movements, shrieks and giggles. When ass-slapping ensues, the sounds are loud and vibrant, and sync up with the mysterious, unassuming drum-beat soundtrack.

Everything in this video works. The editing is tight and poignant, snipping gestures and phrases at just the right, loaded moments. Even the recorded voices are lofty and echo-y, making every minute of this material luscious and dreamlike. Eventually the power struggle reverses itself and submissive Betty gets the upper hand. A very playful suffocation scene is played out.

The performances of Melanie Myle and Marla Belt are super-perfect-o. A text appears on screen, informing the viewer of various historical figures who were tickling connoisseurs, including Mussolini's widow, Catherine the Great, and Janet Jackson.

The next brief installment is even better than the first: a tightly-edited compilation of eight women, each restrained in different classic confinements, being tickled by a barely visible figure, dressed in all black. With the black background all you can see are the tickler's hands: It's the only way you know, or think you know, that she's a female (in one comic fragment she looks like the Grim Reaper, mostly because of a black hood, which kind of turns her into a sisterly Satan).

The eight girls are so adorable and endearing your teeth will hurt watching them; they are tickled senseless by the fiendish fingers. They say "No," and wiggle madly. All the girls are white and pale, each physique strikingly different: a fleshy blonde in a leopard-skin bikini stands in front of a goofy palm tree; a seated baby doll with a pacifier in her mouth squeals uncontrollably; an arresting Annie Lennox look-alike hangs from her wrists, and so on. Each take is quick -- under a minute in length -- the entire sequence running a mere 18 minutes. What is so super-enchanting (and musical) is how diverse and personal each individual laugh is, both in pitch and rhythm. And how infectious; one hates to admit to it, but the take will make you happy

Someone should give director Maria Beatty a blank check so she can make more videos now. She's the shit -- i.e. a goddamn genius.