The play on which the film is based premiered on 18 September 1993 at the Théâtre des Variétés, Paris, with a cast including Jacques Villeret as François Pignon, Claude Brasseur as Pierre Brochant, Michel Robbe as Juste Leblanc and Gérard Hernandez as Lucien Cheval, and directed by Pierre Mondy; it was revived the following season before touring to Bayonne, Liege and Marseille.

As the plans of the hitman in Veber's earlier L'Emmerdeur were continually thrown off course by a well-meaning idiot, in Le Dîner de cons, the same relationship occurs, with “Thierry Lhermitte's supercilious publisher having his well-ordered life dismantled by the disastrously eager-to-please Jacques Villeret”.

[7] Le Dîner de cons ran for over 900 performances on the Parisian stage before being made into a film, so "not surprisingly the pacing and mechanics of the comedy run with dovetailed precision".

[10] Kemp noted that “in this kind of comic pairing [it] isn't the gravitation of the idiot to the straight guy, which is understandable enough, but the reverse: the fatal delusion on the part of a logical individual, operating on cool self-interest, that even the most unpromising human material can, with a little coaching, be co-opted into the same well-ordered system”.

[7] For Kemp the film was stolen by Villeret as Pignon “his balding, spherical head, bug eyes and pudgy little mouth” appearing as “a cross between a giant baby and a less aggressive Zero Mostel.

His comic persona also shares something of a baby's abrupt, discontinuous mood swings, and in the film's funniest moments the camera focuses delightedly on his mobile moon-face as it slumps from inane self-satisfaction to lip-quivering dismay”.