Mike Leigh may well be Britain"s greatest living film director; his world-view has permeated our national consciousness. This book gives detailed readings of the nine feature films he has made for the cinema, as well as an overview of his work for television. Written with the co-operation of Leigh himself, this is the first study of his work to challenge the critical privileging of realism in histories of the British cinema, placing the emphasis instead on the importance of comedy and humor: of jokes and their functions, of laughter as a survival mechanism, and of characterizations and situations that disrupt our preconceptions of "realism".