Jouvet perhaps has never acted a comic role with more savory na�vet�, more delicacy or more poetry.

This young alcoholic reveals his personality more through his acting than through the dialogue. It is not a question here of a passing intoxication, but of deep perturbations. There is no staggering, none of the classical drunken maneuvers, but abrupt, short, incoherent, futile gestures, choppy speech, a disconcerting manner of delivery, brusk effacements, and anxious glances.

L'Ecole des Femmes by Moli�re
[...] Jouvet was a jocular Arnolphe, gloating over every trick he played. Above all, he delighted in conceiving himself as an exceptional husband to whom his wife would never be unfaithful. He was far too perspicacious a fellow, he thought, ever to be duped. [...] he was delightfully amusing to the audience in the way he coddled and deceived himself. This portrayal was at complete variance with the conception of his predecessors. Jouvet portrayed Arnolphe as a good-humored and almost ferociously gay man.
Laughter greeted him as soon as he strutted on the stage. In spite of the funambulesque quality of the play, the brief encounters, the abrupt departures, the village interludes, the asides, Jouvet always kept matters in balance, and with brilliant agility, maintained the tone and poetry of the dialogue. He gave Paris something completely Moli�resque, a happy medium between farce and high comedy.
There was also great variety in Jouvet's acting. His Arnolphe was constantly moving about, and he had a broad range of significant and amusing gestures. His eyes were fascinating to an audience, with their brilliant and varied changes of mood. At one moment they would be full of laughter, at the next, they would be intent; then a fresh surprise, changing suddenly to desperation, and once again an expression of sheer joy in his own high animal spirits and delight in the clever planning and inventions.
All the props in the play contained a subtle significance. Jouvet's walking stick, for instance, [...] clearly revealed what he did not, and need not, say; it was a tool of pantomime. He leaned on it when fatigued; he let it fall when unhappy. In a fit of temper, he threw his handkerchief down, and in a moment of anguish, hid his face in it. He used these props to carry the currents of his feeling beyond his own physical self.[...]
Jouvet understood this character so perfectly and sustained it so well that he was never forced to resort to theatrical artifices or stereotypes during any performance. [...] His speech was always clear and sharp and never slurred, despite some difficult versification.[...]

Electre by Jean Giraudoux
[...] Jouvet played the part of a God-inspired beggar, le Mendiant. In a language laced with imagery and irony, he commented on the acts of fellow men, while probing their most secret thoughts, eventually to make dire prophesies about them. His part was somewhat similar to that of the chorus of antiquity.
Jouvet's ascetic and worn body confered upon him the mysterious authority of one who possesses powers a little more than human. Whenever he commented on events, his eyes stared blindly into a void as they seemed to envision approaching disaster. [...]
Jouvet spoke his lines in a sharp staccato style. By breaking off the ultimate vowel at the end of a phrase, he limited its resonance and imposed a particular rhythm on his speech. This gave to certain of his lines an incantatory quality, which recalled the manner in which pronouncements of old were made. To vary the effect, Jouvet would sometimes speak in a singsong fashion, and this added a ritualistic quality to the text. [...]

Ondine by Jean Giraudoux
[...] When Jouvet first appeared on stage his voice was rude and warlike, revealing his lack of delicacy and sensibility. He was a vain, not fundamentally cruel fellow, and rather childish. He loved war for the opportunities it offered him. After falling in love with Ondine, his character slowly underwent a change, as if influenced by some tender magic. He became gentle, speaking in sotto voce tones: "The voice rarely departs from a pivotal note, within the limits of a third. The syllables are of equal duration." [...]

Dom Juan by Moli�re
[...] When Jouvet walked on stage in his black tights on that first night, he looked sombre, enigmatic, haunted and yet endowed with a compelling sensuousness. But the sensuousness was not the side Jouvet wanted particularly to stress. Dom Juan was no longer the man coveted by women, but a man who walked alone, too independent and corrosively intelligent to submit to the dictates of either God or man [...]. Jouvet played his hero with an underlying anxiety that would have befitted a deeply religious hero. [...] [Dom Juan] was not denying God, but running away from him. This approach to Dom Juan was complex, modern, and, one might say, psychoanalytical. To portray the deeply troubled man, Jouvet made expert use of facial expressions. His glaring aquamarine eyes constantly changed in expression, reflecting, at times, the haughtiness of a Spanish nobleman, and at others, the fear of a hunted man filled with doubt and groping for the tangible, constantly angered by the pettiness of life, and frightened by his own impotency.
In Act III, when Jouvet-Juan met his angry father, he spoke with restraint, though seething within, and wore an air of boredom and subtle insolence. When M. Dimanche, the debt-collector, and the abandoned wife, Dona Elvire, arrived, he greeted them with an icy calm which made more obvious his profound annoyance and impatience. His implacable looks as he took slow circulatory steps around Elvire, his derisive laughs in the beggar and peasant scenes [...], and all his mannerisms served to dramatize the struggle going on, under the cover of his poses, between his several conflicting selves. [...]