Man vs Baby: The comedic delights of Rowan Atkinson still makes us laugh four decades on

Depending on your generation, there is a definitive Rowan Atkinson for you.

For baby boomers and older Gen X-ers, it’s the conniving Blackadder, for older Gen Y-ers, it’s the accident-prone Mr Bean in his tiny car, and for younger Gen Y-ers, it’s probably Rufus, the meticulous gift-wrapper in Love, Actually, or perhaps the bumbling spy Johnny English.

Atkinson has had many onscreen lives, all of them iconic. It’s a rare gift to have had such staying power, and to mean something different to everyone.

Taking pleasure in Atkinson’s presence is a simple delight. Although his comedy is so much more layered and mechanical than you might imagine, he makes it seem effortless.

Take, for example, the lauded 1992 Mr Bean episode, “The Trouble with Mr Bean”. It opens with something as straightforward as the titular character waking up late for an appointment, but the sequence of disasters from his alarm clock to his toothpaste work like an exacting Rube Goldberg-ian contraption.

You can break it down, but it’s more fun to just go with the belly laughs, even as you wince from every new thing that goes wrong as Mr Bean tries to get out the door.

In many ways, Atkinson is the modern inheritor to silent-era comedians such as Charlie Chaplin, Harold Lloyd and Buster Keaton. He often plays these characters out of step with the world around them, and yet somehow, just barely manages to scrape through, albeit a trail of chaos in their wake.

Never underestimate the power of physical comedy, and our natural inclination to find catharsis in an awkward situation – like someone falling flat on their face – with a laugh.

He invites you to laugh at Mr Bean or Blackadder, because they can be narcissistic, careless or scheming people, but there’s something about their spiky charm that, before too long, you’re laughing with them.

Atkinson seems to be acutely aware of those slapstick influences. Mr Bean’s Holiday, the 2007 second feature centred on the character, takes direct inspiration from French filmmaker and comedian Jacques Tati.

Tati was a great admirer of Keaton and his iconic onscreen creation, Monsieur Hulot, owes a lot to Keaton’s legacy. Mr Bean’s Holiday directly references two Tati films – a cycling sequence out of Jour de Fete, in which both Tati’s mailman character and Mr Bean, outpaces a peloton, and more generally Tati’s Les Vacances de M. Hulot.

By drawing from and leaning into the lineage of physical comics before him, Atkinson carries on a great tradition. It might seem, at first, dumb or base, but there is wonderful complexity in slapstick because the timing, the sequencing and what it’s provoking within the story has to be so precise.

Atkinson’s latest release is Man vs Baby, a follow-up to his 2022 series Man vs Bee. The title of the new entry is slightly misleading in that his character, the genial Trevor Bingley, is not pitted against an infant like he was against the bee. This is really more man and baby.

The four-episode comedy is set at Christmas time and revisits Trevor, a house-sitter who agrees to take on an assignment looking after a swanky London penthouse for a quick payday so he can afford his daughter’s school fees.

The complication is he is saddled with this mysterious baby that had been dropped on the doorstep of a school. You can already foresee all the various problems as he tries to hide a baby from his employers while fruitlessly arrange to hand the child off to the authorities.

Missed connections, misunderstandings and various sight gags abound.

Even at the age of 70, Atkinson can convincingly throw his body around the spaces he’s in, even if he doesn’t move as fast or flexibility as he used to. But his timing is still impeccable, and he can extract genuine chortles out of something as seemingly simple as holding up a bag of dog poo. Age has not wearied the expressivity of his face.

Its slightly less chaotic nature also keeps in tone with Man vs Baby, which is a gentle seasonal story that is far more generous in spirit than the anarchy of Man vs Bee.

What it relies on above all is Atkinson and the goodwill he’s built up over the years as a truly singular comedic talent of the past four decades who’s been able to connect with every generation.

Man vs Baby is streaming on Netflix