Michel Simon called Boudu a "pique-assiette", a sponger, while the writer Richard Boston rejected the idea that Boudu had much in common with the hippies of the late 1960s, as Pauline Kael had suggested. "The "Oxford English Dictionary" says that hippie is a hipster; a person usually exotically dressed; a beatnik. None of this sounds remotely like Boudu. Boudu doesn't reject conventional values: he never had them in the first place: you wouldn't catch him doing anything as pussy-footing as 'rejecting conventional values.' " Rather, Boston argues, Boudu is what the French call a "marginal". Boudu is anarchic, chaotic, and finally, a fool. An archetype, "these agents of chaos act out our secret desires. If "we" see a big bum we might want to kick it: Chaplin "does" kick it...Laurel and Hardy, the Marx Brothers, Boudu, and Hulot are the enemies of conformity, of what can be regulated. They are the awkward squad."