The comedy in this 1960 flick is total tongue in cheek visual absurdism, 20 years before Airplane! landed on us like a Boeing 747. Although Zazie doesn't go into extreme wordplay gags (shirley it's a bit more serious), it gets pretty extreme as far as visual bizarreness and insane editing. For example the camera might cut to a character who's suddenly being played by a totally different actor (of a different race) for just a split second before going back to the regular actor like nothing happened. And there are leaps of logic & continuity straight out of the Airplane universe, like when Albertine takes Zazie off to bed, coming back literally 2 seconds later to say "she went right to sleep".

Getting a little darker, there's also the way disturbing topics like pedophilia are handled with deadpan comedy: the scene where the creepy pedo is wining & dining 10-year-old Zazie with oysters in a fancy restaurant as spectators gather to watch... kinda like Airplane's Capt Over with the little kid, "Ever been in a cockpit before? Ever seen a grown man naked? Joey do you like movies about gladiators?"

So many parallels it makes me wonder if this flick directly influenced the Zucker Abrahams Zucker team in the 80s. I know there were other absurdist films in the mid to late 60s such as Jerry Lewis's repertoire when he started directing (Nutty Professor, etc), but was Zazie dans le metro the 1st to get this extreme?