A German comedy?

We like to think we all laugh at the same things – that humour is a universal constant, like pi – but of course we don’t. What’s hysterical to one person may be offensive to another, and childish or tedious to someone else. Even so, there’s a particular discomfort in feeling excluded from a joke. A nettling sort of irritation.

It’s a warm summer evening in May 2016, and I’m sitting in the Salle Debussy at the Cannes Film Festival, watching the press screening of a new German comedy, Toni Erdmann (in national release 9 February), by the Berlin-based writer-director Maren Ade. Beside me is a friend, an American critic who lives in Paris. The 1068-seat cinema is packed; we’re surrounded by professional film-watchers of every age and nationality, all laughing uproariously at a film that seems, to me, the exact opposite of funny. Occasionally we glance at each other....