Louis de Funès as Gendarme: Comic Incongruity and Self-Reflexive Music in the Golden Age of French Comedies (1964–80)

Raymond Lefèvre was arguably one of the first French comedy film composers in the 1960s, who shaped his scores according to the aesthetics of self-reflexive film music. From various film genres, he borrowed musical tropes which invoke stereotypical cinematic emotions. In Jean Girault’s highly popular Le gendarme de Saint-Tropez series (1964–1982), he used these eclectically chosen musical set-pieces as ironic signifiers parodying the hackneyed moods of standardized filmic situations in an overtly cliched fashion. The music in these films further works according to the concept of comic incongruity. Lefèvre’s score sets up expectations, which are not fulfilled, but instead contradicted by the on-screen action. Such an incongruity occurs with the ‘Marche des gendarmes’, which is self-reflexively modelled after the march in The Bridge on the River Kwai (1957, dir. David Lean) and which generates comic incongruity between the uplifting music and the inept gendarmes. In the Gendarme series, the comedic effect occurs thus through the music referring to stereotyped film-music tropes, which clash as ironic incongruities against the on-screen action.