Jacques Tati is widely regarded as one of the greatest postwar European filmmakers. He made innovative and challenging comedies while achieving international box office success and attaining a devoted following. In Play Time, Malcolm Turvey examines Tati’s unique comedic style and evaluates its significance for the history of film and modernism.

Turvey argues that Tati captured elite and general audiences alike by combining a modernist aesthetic with slapstick routines, gag structures, and other established traditions of mainstream film comedy. Considering films such as Monsieur Hulot’s Holiday (1953), Mon Oncle (1958), Play Time (1967), and Trafic (1971), Turvey shows how Tati drew on the rich legacy of comic silent film while modernizing its conventions in order to encourage his viewers to adopt a playful attitude toward the modern world. Turvey also analyzes Tati’s sardonic view of the bourgeoisie and his complex and multifaceted satire of modern life. Tati's singular and enduring achievement, Turvey concludes, was to translate the democratic ideals of the postwar avant-garde into mainstream film comedy, crafting a genuinely popular modernism. Richly illustrated with images from the director’s films, Play Time offers an illuminating and original understanding of Tati’s work.

"Turvey provides a sharply observant account of the scope and function of the more ‘cognitively challenging’ of these comic devices in Tati’s major films." - London Review of Books

"Turvey’s study of Tati’s context traces a fascinating continuity between the clown tradition, Charlie Chaplin’s construction of comic personas and the role of the 'living object' in Dada, Surrealism, Cubism and other interwar artistic movements." - Times Literary Supplement

"Play Time is a subtle, intelligent—and wonderfully funny—book. It has much to offer both Tati novices and his connoisseurs." - Modernism/modernity

"The book is a delicious treat, and serious film students will appreciate it as a penetrating primer on the cinematic comic artisdt at work." - Choice

"Play Time: Jacques Tati and Comedic Modernism must be warmly recommended reading for all lovers of Tati, particularly since it is written by one of them, which shows. And my recommendation gets only warmer for all those who, like myself, are interested in understanding comedy and its mechanisms." - Alphaville Journal

"Play Time wonderfully, succinctly, precisely points to Tati’s liberating filmmaking that ultimately hails the outcast as the only true observer . . . [Turvey] leads us to a much more refreshed Tati." - Projections