Jean-Marie Poiré’s Papy fait de la résistance (1983) occupies an unusual position in French cinema. On the surface, it is an exuberant farce about a French family living under German occupation during the Second World War. Its exaggerated characters, physical comedy, absurd situations and deliberately ridiculous performances make it one of the most recognisable popular comedies of its period. Yet beneath this apparently chaotic humour lies a distinctly political film. Papy fait de la résistance does not simply reproduce the familiar opposition between heroic French Resistance fighters and evil German occupiers. Instead, it plays with the myths surrounding the Occupation and asks what it actually meant for ordinary French people to live under German rule. Its humour is therefore political precisely because it makes the supposedly respectable, heroic and coherent version of French wartime history look ridiculous.

Released in 1983, almost forty years after the Liberation, the film emerged at a significant moment in the development of French cultural memory. The Occupation was no longer a recent historical event, but neither was it comfortably distant. The question of collaboration, Vichy and French responsibility remained politically and culturally sensitive. Papy fait de la résistance takes this difficult history and turns it into farce. An official French government educational project has subsequently used the film to examine precisely these questions, asking what the comedy tells us about French memory of the Occupation and whether it is possible to laugh about collaboration and the violence of the period.

The film's central political strategy is to undermine the simplified idea that France during the Occupation consisted of two clearly defined groups: heroic résistants on one side and traitorous collaborators on the other. The Bourdelle family is caught between these categories. They are not initially presented as fearless political activists. Instead, they are ordinary people attempting to survive an extraordinary situation. Their home is occupied, their lives are disrupted and they become involved in resistance almost through circumstance. This is important because the film's comedy comes partly from the distance between the heroic language traditionally associated with the Resistance and the confused, frightened and self-interested behaviour of ordinary individuals.

This ambiguity is particularly visible in the character of Guy-Hubert, the apparently effeminate hairdresser who is secretly the legendary "Super-Résistant". The character is an obvious parody of the heroic Resistance figure. He possesses the exaggerated confidence, skill and theatricality of a comic superhero rather than the characteristics of an ordinary clandestine fighter. His double identity also creates a fundamental joke about appearances: the apparently harmless man is the secret hero, while other apparently respectable characters may be hiding less admirable behaviour. The film therefore makes identity itself unstable. During the Occupation, nobody is necessarily what they appear to be.

This becomes even more significant through the character of Adolfo Ramirez, the French collaborator. Ramirez represents one of the film's most direct political targets: French collaborationism. Importantly, the film does not need to make German characters the sole source of evil. Instead, some of its most aggressive satire is directed towards French people who collaborate with the occupying power. Ramirez is petty, vindictive and ridiculous, turning political collaboration into a grotesque extension of personal resentment. His collaboration is not presented as the result of grand political conviction but as an opportunity for revenge and social advancement. The joke consequently has a serious implication: political extremism can operate through ordinary personal motives.

The film's treatment of collaboration is particularly interesting because it refuses to romanticise the French population. Scholarship on the film has noted that the Occupation produced a wide variety of behaviours, from active resistance to collaboration and the numerous forms of accommodation that existed between those extremes. Papy fait de la résistance transforms this complexity into comedy. In doing so, it challenges the comforting idea that the French population collectively resisted the Germans. Instead, it presents a society in which people adapt, compromise, conceal their interests and sometimes behave heroically almost by accident.

This is one of the reasons the film can be considered politically subversive despite its deliberately silly tone. The jokes make it possible to attack national myths without adopting the tone of a historical lecture. Rather than saying directly that the French memory of the Occupation is complicated, Poiré constructs situations in which the audience experiences that complication through absurdity. Characters who should be heroic become ridiculous; characters who appear respectable reveal contradictions; and resistance itself becomes a mixture of courage, incompetence and theatrical performance.

The film is therefore also a satire of the cinema that had previously represented the Occupation. Papy fait de la résistance does not exist in isolation from French wartime cinema; it constantly plays with familiar cinematic conventions. Its "Super-Résistant" is deliberately excessive, and the film draws upon recognisable images of resistance heroes and German officers in order to distort them. One critical analysis has argued that the film particularly parodies the idealised image of the French population created by earlier representations of the Occupation, including films that contributed to the idea that ordinary French people had secretly been resisting all along.

This makes the film's politics partly a politics of representation. It asks not only "What happened during the Occupation?" but also "How have we chosen to represent what happened?" The distinction matters. Historical memory is constructed through stories, films, television and national commemorations. By exaggerating these familiar narratives until they become ridiculous, Papy fait de la résistance exposes the artificiality of some of the myths surrounding the period.

The humour is essential to this process. The film uses an extremely broad comic vocabulary: slapstick, physical comedy, parody, caricature, wordplay, mistaken identity, sexual humour, theatrical exaggeration and deliberately excessive performances. The comedy is rarely subtle. Instead, it repeatedly pushes situations beyond the limits of realism. A character hides a British soldier in a laundry basket; people attempt to maintain respectable appearances while chaos develops around them; German officers are turned into comic figures; and the supposedly terrifying structures of occupation repeatedly collapse into farce.

The physical nature of the humour is particularly important. The body becomes a political instrument. Characters trip, hide, shout, disguise themselves and physically collide with the machinery of authority. This is significant because authoritarian systems depend upon the appearance of discipline and control. The Germans represent an occupying military power built around uniforms, hierarchy and obedience, yet the comedy constantly turns these symbols of authority into objects of ridicule. The more seriously the characters attempt to behave, the more absurd the situation becomes.

In this respect, Papy fait de la résistance belongs to a wider French tradition of using comedy to expose the weaknesses of authority. This is one reason it can be usefully compared with the Gendarme films starring Louis de Funès. In those films, institutional authority is repeatedly undermined by the gap between rules and reality: the police officers believe in order, but the world refuses to behave according to their expectations. Our discussion of why The Gendarme of Saint-Tropez still feels surprisingly modern similarly identifies the tension between institutional authority and the unpredictable behaviour of ordinary people as a central source of its comedy.

The connection is particularly appropriate because Louis de Funès was originally considered for Papy fait de la résistance, and the role eventually associated with Jacques Villeret was conceived with him in mind. Michel Galabru, another major figure from the Gendarme films, ultimately played Papy. This casting history places Papy fait de la résistance within a broader tradition of French popular comedy in which authority becomes funniest when it is exaggerated to the point of incompetence.

Yet the political stakes of Papy fait de la résistance are more complicated than simple anti-authoritarian comedy. The film was criticised at the time precisely because of its treatment of the Resistance. Jean-Marie Poiré has recalled that the film received particularly severe criticism concerning its political dimension. Some former Resistance members were also uncomfortable with the way the film transformed the period into comedy. This controversy demonstrates that humour itself was part of the political argument. To laugh at the Occupation could appear disrespectful, especially when the memories involved imprisonment, persecution, collaboration and death.

The film's answer is not to treat history as unimportant but to suggest that the heroic version of history can itself be misleading. Its laughter is directed in several directions at once. The Nazis are mocked, but so are collaborators. The Resistance is celebrated, but its mythology is mocked as well. Ordinary French people are shown as capable of courage, but also fear, selfishness and absurdity. This prevents the film from becoming a straightforward patriotic comedy. Its politics emerge from contradiction.

The most interesting target of the humour may therefore be the desire for historical purity. The film refuses to divide the past neatly into heroes and villains. Even characters associated with resistance can be compromised, while apparently respectable characters can behave cowardly or selfishly. The final television-debate structure reinforces this idea by bringing the characters and their descendants into a later historical moment in which the past can be discussed, disputed and reinterpreted. History becomes something that people continue to perform and argue about rather than something that exists as a single uncontested story.

This approach was particularly relevant in 1983 because French society was still negotiating the legacy of the Occupation. By transforming the period into a comic spectacle, the film could approach subjects that remained uncomfortable in more conventional forms of historical representation. Comedy creates distance. The audience is allowed to laugh before being encouraged to recognise the seriousness underneath the joke. This is one of the central paradoxes of the film: its apparent frivolity allows it to address serious political questions.

The film's enormous popularity also matters. Papy fait de la résistance attracted more than four million spectators in French cinemas, making its political satire part of mainstream popular culture rather than a marginal intellectual critique. Its success demonstrates that historical memory could be negotiated through mass entertainment. The fact that audiences repeatedly returned to the film suggests that its characters and jokes became a shared cultural vocabulary through which the Occupation could be remembered.

The humour also works because it creates a tension between historical reality and comic unreality. The audience knows that the Occupation was a period of genuine violence and fear, yet the film deliberately places that reality alongside ridiculous costumes, exaggerated personalities and absurd situations. The resulting discomfort is productive. We laugh, but the laughter continually reminds us that the historical situation underneath the comedy was not funny. The contrast between reality and representation becomes part of the film's meaning.

Ultimately, Papy fait de la résistance is political because it refuses to leave the past alone. It challenges the heroic mythology of the French Resistance without denying the courage of those who resisted. It ridicules collaboration without presenting French society as uniformly guilty. Most importantly, it exposes the instability of national memory: the stories societies tell about themselves are often cleaner and more flattering than the historical reality.

Its humour makes this argument possible. Slapstick and caricature strip authority of its dignity, parody turns heroic conventions into clichés, and absurdity exposes the gap between the way people imagine themselves and the way they actually behave. The film's comedy is therefore not merely decorative. It is the mechanism through which its politics operate.

In this sense, Papy fait de la résistance belongs to a particularly rich tradition of French comedy in which institutions, authority and national self-image become objects of laughter. Like the Gendarme films, it finds comedy in the failure of systems to behave as neatly as their representatives expect. But in Papy fait de la résistance, the stakes are considerably higher: the institution being examined is not simply the police or bureaucracy but the national memory of one of the most traumatic periods in modern French history.

The result is a film that is deliberately ridiculous but not politically empty. Its central joke is ultimately directed at the desire to turn history into a simple story of good people and bad people. By making everyone slightly ridiculous, Papy fait de la résistance creates space for a more complicated understanding of the Occupation. Its laughter does not erase history; instead, it forces the audience to question the stories through which history is remembered.