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One of European comedy’s most reliable stock types is the dunderheaded academic, that erudite boob who knows so much about so much and yet hopelessly little about human nature. There’s not really an equivalent in the American cinema, but in parts abroad, this figure can be found getting his laughs (and they do always seem to be male, the cluelessness inextricable from the masculinity) by attempting to wrestle the messiness of life into order through hypotheses, theorems, and experiments. In recent years, we’ve seen him try to think through the crisis of modern media in Olivier Assayas’