Anachronistic Heroes in French Comedy Cinema: When Work Ends (If, Indeed, it Begins…)

Comedy cinema in general has been very much under-treated in academic work on film, and French comedy cinema is no exception. Drawing on recent works, I seek to restore comedy cinema to a state of scholarly prominence after a period of at least forty years of relative inertia.1 To do so I point to the ‘hero’ status of what I term ‘anachronistic’ French comedy cinema characters—including Monsieur Hulot (Jacques Tati) in Mon Oncle (1958); Rose Pamphyle (Déborah François) in Régis Roinsard’s Populaire (2012); and George Valentin (Jean Dujardin) in Michel Hazanavicus’s French–US production The Artist (2011)—and the relationship between this ‘hero’ status and their occupational circumstances