Funny / Playtime

• The posters at the travel agency, no matter what the destination - Hawaii, Stockholm, Mexico, London - are mostly taken up by nearly identical dull, rectangular skyscrapers, surrounded at the edges by a few small images more appropriate to the destination.
• One of the booths at the trade exhibition showcases soundproof doors that even close silently. At one point, a short man in a scarf sits at the desk in the booth and rifles through the drawers, seemingly engaging in industrial espionage. A misunderstanding leads the manager of the booth to believe M. Hulot is the spy, and he curses him out before storming into the other half of the booth and slamming the door. Silently. Twice.
• The "Apartment" sequence in which Hulot is invited home for a drink by a former Army comrade is shot from the street, putting the audience in the position of voyeurs spying on the characters. The joke is heightened when both Hulot's friend and their next door neighbours (who happen to be the Giffards, the family of the man Hulot has been trying to meet with all day) both switch on their televisions, which are built into the shared wall between their flats, to watch a boxing broadcast. Because said wall is hidden by an exterior concrete pillar, it looks as though Hulot's friend's family and the Giffards are watching each other; for example, the former seem to be recoiling in shock at the bandage on Giffard's nose, while the Giffards seem to be watching Hulot's friend undressing with great interest.
• The "Royal Garden" sequence was so painstakingly choreographed that it took seven weeks to film, and it was worth every second. Between corners being cut on construction and poor planning by the management, the restaurant's opening night devolves into hilarious chaos:
  • The tone is set when, with minutes to go before they open, the manager gets one of the vinyl tiles of the dance floor stuck to the bottom of his shoe and has to rush into the kitchen to have it prised off. For the rest of the evening, whenever the staff have to walk across the dance floor, they make an exaggerated show of stepping over the replacement tile to allow the glue to dry (surprisingly, it doesn't end up stuck to any of the dancers' shoes).
  • The wrought metal crowns on the backs of the chairs may look impressive, but they leave imprints on the backs of the customers' coats, while the waiters' uniforms keep snagging on them. One waiter tears the front of his trouser leg on a chair back and is told to wait outside until they can get the means to repair it. Then a second waiter snags his jacket on another chair back, goes outside, and swaps jackets with the first waiter. A third waiter trips over a step between two sections of tables (the floor being black and the light that should illuminate it being badly wired), breaking half of the sole off his shoe, so he swaps shoes with the first waiter. And then a fourth waiter is slapped on the back by the manager for standing idle, sending his clip-on bow tie falling into a plate of food, so he swaps ties with the first waiter, by which time the latter looks as though he's spent the evening being dragged through the streets by a bus.
  • One of the specials is a turbot served on a silver tray, which the waiters are instructed to season with salt, pepper, and lemon before covering it in a wine sauce. Because the staff and the customers keep getting distracted by new mishaps, the same fish is sent to around half a dozen tables. At one point, one of the couples to whom the fish is about to be served decide to hit the dance floor, and when another couple arrive, the waiters, not realising the table's original occupants are still there, clear away the plates and glasses but leave the fish sitting on the tray in front of the table. Eventually, a waiter flambés the now massively overseasoned fish in a huge fireball.
  • The management grossly underestimate how many people will attend opening night, so they run out of hot food after a few hours. Two waiters are told to remove the menu, which is displayed in the lobby by a metal statue of a chef; one takes the head, the other takes the legs, and they carry the statue through the dining room, creating the impression in both the diners and the audience that they are carrying a dead body.
  • The doorman is another former Army buddy of M. Hulot, and he invites him in for drinks and dinner, but when he is trying to drag Hulot inside, the doorman pulls him straight into the glass door, smashing it into tiny shards. He quickly sweeps up the glass and spends the rest of the evening holding the metal door handle where it would be if the door were intact, miming opening and closing it as more guests arrive and leave. None of them seem to notice, even when he turns the handle sideways so that they can deposit their tips into it. Meanwhile, when the glass is finally cleaned up, they lie and tell the manager it's ice, so he tells them to dump it into a champagne bucket.
  • The restaurant's air conditioning isn't switched on for the first several hours, so the ice cream desserts are melting before they can be served. There is a model aeroplane behind the bar, and while an engineer is trying to turn on the A/C (the words on the console not being in French), the customers at the bar watch in confusion as the wings, tail, and fuselage on the model start drooping. When the A/C is finally switched on (with such force that it causes the flesh on a female diner's back to ripple), the wings, tail, and fuselage rise back into their original position.
  • When M. Hulot accidentally pulls down the drop ceiling over one of the entrances to the kitchen, it falls down in such a way that it forms a fence around a corner of the dining room. A rich yet jovial American guest decides to turn it into a more authentically Parisian bistro, and late in the evening, he goes back to the kitchen, raises the black gate over the window between the kitchen and the dining room, and slaps a tricolor beer mat onto it so that it looks like Napoléon Bonaparte's hat; he declares the chef the Napoleon of the kitchen.
  • A drunk guest tries to ask M. Hulot for directions to the Golden Corkscrew on Rue Piccolo; Hulot fetches a map and tries to show the guest how to get there when another drunk guest falls off his bar stool for the third time. He rushes over, turns the stool upside-down, and stands the guest inside it so that he doesn't fall over again. Meanwhile, the first drunk guest has mistaken the patterns in the marble on one of the pillars for the map and is following the lines with his fingers, to loud laughter from a passing waiter.
• When M. Hulot buys a headscarf as a farewell gift for Barbara, the American tourist he has befriended, he mistakes a fondue set on a shelf next to the cash register for the exit turnstile. The typically officious security guard won't let him leave unless he goes through the turnstile properly, by which time an old woman with a huge basket of groceries is standing at the turnstile ahead of him.

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