Mr. Jourdain - the bourgeois gentleman - is a wealthy urbanite, with a comfortable home and a family that loves and respects him. However, his megalomania, like a disease, overwhelms him and makes him gullible to those who want to exploit him.

He spends money to rid himself of the stigma of his humble origins and mimics behaviors foreign to his upbringing in order to be accepted by the ruling class; and as a culmination, he falls victim to the fallen Count Dorante, who borrows money from him without repayment, while the bourgeois gentleman dreams of marrying him to his daughter Lucile and thus entering the circles of the aristocracy - even though his daughter loves a handsome young man without noble titles.

The hero's misfortunes do not serve as a comedic self-purpose but are presented as a necessary consequence of his inherent shortcomings, thus charging his actions with a moral and spiritual counterbalance. Generally, Molière's Bourgeois Gentleman is not considered among his most significant works. It is classified as a lighter genre - in the comedies with ballet.

But what distinguishes these "secondary" comedies or even his farces is that they have preserved, more or less, the popular character of the older French farce, the so-called Gallic, and something from the improvisational Italian comedy, the commedia dell' arte, where for both, the primary concern was the theatrical pulse, the stage setup with rhythmic movement, as well as mimicry.