The Ten of Swords shows a figure face down with ten blades in his back under a black sky, and it is the card most likely to be greeted with laughter, because its excess is obvious. That excess is deliberate, and it is worth taking seriously as a design decision.
Like several of Pamela Colman Smith's sword cards, the composition is generally thought to owe something to the Sola Busca deck of the 1490s, whose illustrated pips were available to her in photographs at the British Museum. The Marseille version is ten swords in a pattern, and carries no scene at all.
The occult layer assigns the tens to Malkuth, the tenth sephirah and the material world, and reads the suit's element of air at its heaviest and most fixed, thought that has gone as far as it can go.
The standard reading is an ending that is total and already complete. What distinguishes it from Death is that this card describes a defeat rather than a transition, and describes it as finished: the worst has happened, and the situation is now past being made worse. Many readers take that as the card's actual mercy, and read a rising light on the horizon in Smith's version as the point.
The critical reading is melodrama, a querent invested in the completeness of their disaster. Waite gives advantage and profit for the reversed card, which is one of his least intuitive reversals and a reminder that his lists cannot be guessed at. Readers who do not use reversals reach the same territory by noting that a card describing a finished disaster has, by definition, nothing left to take.