According to Guy Bedos “comedy is also a form of resistance”.
He started out by resisting his own situation – a Frenchman from
Algeria, he came into conflict with his family when the war of
independence broke out, by virulently denouncing colonialism. In his
earliest appearances on the Paris stage in the mid 1960s, this
permanent rebel stood out from the common run of comedians for his free
speech and the often politicised basis of his sketches. Although the
duo he formed with his wife, Sophie Daumier, until 1975, tended to
depict the shortcomings of the relations between the sexes, in his
stormy TV appearances Bedos never failed to raise his voice very
loudly, an unhesitatingly leftwing voice which remained staunchly
independent of the authorities. Moreover, starting in the 1980s, during
François Mitterrand’s presidency, he transformed his shows into press
Topicality of books in which, improvising instantly on the news, he
cast an often enlightened and always pithy eye on political mores and
social trends. The inspiration for Coluche and Pierre Desproges, a
close friend with whom he shared a profound pessimism beneath his mask
of public entertainer, Bedos has outlived both. He celebrates his
seventieth birthday this year and has certainly not made his last
cutting comment.
François Rabelais was unaware when he published his orgiastic masterpieces, Gargantua and Pantagruel,
in the 16th century, just how many crimes of comedy would later be
committed in his name. Sheltering under that wrongfully assumed label
of “Rabelaisian” humour, is an entire palette of vulgarities supposedly
embodying a French spirit directly inherited from our Gallic ancestors:
sexual romps, saucy stories, everyday male chauvinism, good-natured
racism and unifying populism, all coated in a layer of infantile
scatology.
One of today’s most popular French comedians,
Jean-Marie Bigard, is heir to the rather unsophisticated line of
quick-fire foul-mouthed comedians and smutty “poets” who populated the
cabarets before the advent of TV. Nowadays the small screen is their
second home, they present programmes (Lagaf’, Patrick Sébastien) or are
permanent guests on them, reeling off crude strings of jokes for the
benefit of the “common man”, which owe as much to colonial barrack room
humour as to the school playground or the bar. Neither really wicked
nor truly dangerous, it might be seen as sinister.
It is impossible to describe Pierre Desproges as just a comedian. The man who invented the saying “You can laugh at everything, but not with everyone”,
did indeed laugh at everything, never idiotically, and with
unparalleled verve. This former sales manager of a factory that made
polystyrene beams became, from the mid 1970s, a formidable author with
a dark and acid pen, moving from radio to television with equal
disregard for convention.
The heir to Alphonse Allais and Guy Bedos –
who urged him to perform on stage – Desproges wrote and said the most
appalling things about everyone in the most polished and elegant
French. Nonetheless he remains one of the very few that can be read
like a classic, and the titles of his numerous books reveal the sort of
humour that drives them: Chronique de la haine ordinaire [Chronicle of everyday hatred], Vivons heureux en attendant la mort [Enjoy life while you wait for death] or Manuel de savoir-vivre à l’usage des rustres et des malpolis [Manual
of manners for peasants and the uncouth] (pub. Le Seuil, “Points”
series, Paris, 1981). A mock misanthrope in genuine despair, Pierre
Desproges showed what he could do in his one-man shows from 1984
onwards. Dying prematurely from illness in 1988, he kept up his morbid
self-mockery to the end.
In the late 1980s, the Nuls delighted viewers of Canal+, using other television programmes as their main targets.
Commercial television came to France between
1984 and 1986, first with the pay-to-view channel Canal +, then with
Silvio Berlusconi’s imported Italian soaps (La Cinq) and lastly with
the privatisation of the first public channel, TF1. A change that
provided fertile ground for inspiration for an entire generation of new
comics who worked on televisual parody. Les Nuls and Les Inconnus [the Nobodies and the Unknowns]
were the undisputed masters of the genre during the 1980s. The first,
on Canal +, kicking off with a crazy serial, a kind of loopy Star Trek,
followed by spoof ads, hijacking the codes of televised news and ending
by looping the loop with a proper weekly programme inspired by both the
American Saturday Night Live and the British Monty Python Show.
Les Inconnus, from the café-theatre but originally made famous by television, first performed a parody of a TV game show (Télémagouille)
on the stage, which gave them the idea of repeating the exercise … on
television. So during the 1990s a public channel offered them five
evenings under the title La Télé des Inconnus [Unknowns’ TV]
in which they targeted with their fairly subtle humour – with
irresistible impressions of individuals or archetypes – all TV genres
from TV news to variety, from party political broadcasts to children’s
programmes.
Michel Colucci, alias Coluche, was one of the
most savage humourists in the history of French comedy. His stage
career, which began in the late 1960s on the boards of a Parisian
café-theatre, took off phenomenally in the late 1970s. His clown
character in dungarees and a red nose belied language of a violence
hitherto unheard-of except in the press. Indeed his targets were the
same as those of the satirical papers like Charlie Hebdo or Hara-Kiri: the average Frenchman (or everday stupidity), politicians, the police, priests, etc.
Coluche managed to find a new and deeper
angle of attack on these archetypes, like a cluster bomb that spares
nothing and no-one. Man of the stage, film, TV and radio, Coluche
achieved the status of popular philosopher, and as he aged began to
slide towards a questionable populism. By threatening to stand at the
1981 presidential election, he once shook the Republic to its
foundations. Dying tragically in a motorcycle accident in 1986, people
now have a less controversial image of him, remembering him as the
founder of an organisation to help the most deprived, Les Restos du cœur.
Hoax calls date back almost to the time when
the telephone first became common in French homes. They are often
thought to have been invented by comedian and humourist Francis Blanche
who, with Jean Yanne, first established the genre in the 1960s.
Targeting both individuals and governments, he invented totally
ludicrous and crazy scenarios that only the victim could believe were
real.
Some years later, the great Jean-Yves Lafesse
picked up the torch, and reached levels of absurdity and madness rarely
achieved on radio. Imitating all kinds of people, and showing proof of
a quite incredible power of persuasion and ingenuity, Lafesse cast both
listeners and victims into a surreal whirlwind. One day, for instance,
he convinced a member of staff at the French Society for the Protection
of Animals that his dog – world trampolining champion – had leapt so
spectacularly high that he had never come down again.
Of the various comedians made popular in
recent years through the magnifying effect of television, a few have
skilfully played the always delicate game of mocking social
conventions, squarely targeting certain social groups. Canal+, the TV
channel always at the cutting edge of comedy, brought fame to the
twosome Edouard Baer and Ariel Wizman, two fast-talking improvisers
raised in the school of radio, in whose wake a horde of comedians
followed, playing night-clubbers and social parasites, laughing at a
previously under-represented group: the educated but idle urban trendy.
Capable of reducing their audience to pure delirium, the performers
sometimes turned the set of the early-evening programme “Nulle Part
ailleurs” [Nowhere else] into a kind of crazy discotheque.
At the other end of the spectrum, Jérôme
Deschamps and Macha Makeïeff’s company working under the name
Deschiens, sent up the limited social and intellectual skills of
countryfolk without descending into gratuitous nastiness and with a
degree of affection and Tati-style lyricism.
Michel Audiard is himself the epitome of the
profession of comedy screenwriter. Certainly, the young film-makers of
the New Wave made him one of their favourite targets, calling him, for
example, the “Marivaux of the bar” (which he took as a compliment), but in the long run his style, and his witticisms especially, have entered the language (“When you put bastards into orbit you still go round in circles”),
and even literary circles. For Audiard was above all head over heels in
love with the French language and an admirer of classic authors such as
Céline.
In the one hundred and twenty or so films for
which he wrote the screenplay, in many of which his dialogue was the
sole attraction, he managed to combine brilliantly his impeccable
mastery of syntax with florid inventions of underworld and Parisian bar
slang. His influence is still enormous twenty years after his death,
especially through his cult-witticisms for Georges Lautner’s films (Les Tontons flingueurs [Trigger-happy uncles], Ne nous fâchons pas [We don’t lose our temper]), and his genius has never been equalled. (“I
say and maintain that marriage is what distinguishes man from beast.
You may think this is a joke. But it’s not the same thing at all.”).
The fearsome mimic, Laurent Gerra, takes a stab as much at political leaders as showbiz stars.
Impersonation is a genre of which French
comics are particularly fond, undoubtedly because the “freedom to
blame”, so dear to Beaumarchais, is all the greater when the performer
assumes the appearance of his target. Politicians in the front line,
but also singers, actors, public figures and sportsmen and women thus
regularly serve as cannon fodder for these “terrorists” of comedy, able
to hijack any voice, sometimes in a diabolical way.
Although Thierry Le Luron was for a long time
the most popular comedy impressionist, particularly for his ferocity
towards the political class of the 1970s, his chameleon talent has lost
some of its shine over time. The same applies to Patrick Sébastien, the
best at both physical and vocal impersonation. Today, Laurent Gerra has
successfully created a bigger and more realistic range of voices, even
though his scripts sometimes flirt with a rather vengeful populism.
Through the latex puppets of “Les Guignols” on Canal +, impersonation
has become a noble art, in some cases even becoming as famous as their
originals: Jacques Chirac, Johnny Hallyday…
Patrick
Poivre d’Arvor, star presenter of France’s most popular television news
programme, as a puppet on the satirical show, Les Guignols de l’Info.
In all his interviews Jamel Debbouze is
emphatic: he would never have been able to earn the title of “funniest
man in France” if he had not previously worked his way up through the
improvisation leagues. Imported from Quebec (Canada), where in 1975
Robert Gravel organised the first match of its kind at the Montreal
Experimental Theatre, these celebrated leagues have become true battles
of the comics, a sort of friendly wrestling match of words and jokes.
The teams are given a subject and do battle with flurries of puns,
mimicry and absurd references. They knock out their opponent by
striking a formidable verbal blow or pulling a face which defies any
response.
Slightly unfashionable in France in the late
1980s, then making a strong comeback in the early 1990s, the
improvisation leagues have shaped an entire generation of off-the-wall
comics, dedicated to instant comedy, quick-fire jokes and spontaneity.
France has a long tradition of comedy double
acts, idiotic twosomes passing the ball in a disconcerting fashion,
direct descendants of Flaubert’s Bouvard et Pécuchet (1881). The genre
was made popular in the 1960s by the masterly duo of Jean Poiret and
Michel Serrault, who took turns playing the role of simpleton to end up
in Ubu-esque situations in which their mutual lack of understanding and
talking at cross-purposes raised hysterical laughter.
Other outstanding comedy double acts include
Guy Bedos and Sophie Daumier, who played with the conventions of
couples throughout the 1970s; Chevalier and Laspallès, a kind of town
mouse and country mouse, gentle chroniclers of the 1980s; and, more
recently, Eric and Ramzy, skilled exponents of an absurd and inventive
ping-pong, adapted for the big screen in two film parodies: La Tour Montparnasse infernale [The Montparnasse Towering Inferno] (2001) and Double Zéro [Double Zero] (2004).
While you might expect to have to wait until
the very end of the evening, it was very early in the morning that
dangerous comedy made its appearance in mainland France. In 2001,
France had hardly finished breakfast when it discovered on television,
in “Morning Live” on M6, a true crank – Michaël Youn – who ran stark
naked through the streets armed with a megaphone or threw himself
against walls shouting “Not bad!”.
A far cry from the usual canons of French
humour, Youn invented a stream of comic ways of poking fun, achieving
unprecedented audiences for an early-morning programme. Crowned with
success and tired of playing the clown so early, this French Django
Edwards left television in 2002 to apply his raw talent first to
satirical song, with the Bratisla Boys, a successful spoof group
singing any old thing but then taking it to the top of the hit parade,
then to films with La Beuze (2003) and especially Les Onze Commandements (2004) [The Eleven Commandments], a kind of French Jackass (2002), opportunist but very funny.
Making people laugh by talking about your
life is the very essence of stand-up comedy, a form of comedy very
popular in the United States, popularised notably by Eddy Murphy in the
early 1980s. Long neglected in France, it has nonetheless found a
master here in the person of Jamel Debbouze. Working his way up through
the improvisation leagues, then through the pay-TV channel Canal+ and
films, this young French Moroccan stepped on to the stage in the late
1990s to present his first show, Jamel en scène [Jamel on stage], with
the sole ambition of making the country double up laughing at life.
With an inimitable flow of patter, Jamel talks about his parents, his
brothers, Trappes – the town on the outskirts of Paris where he was
born – and very objectively talks about his journey from young “beur”
[North African immigrant] to popular idol (he is now the highest-paid
comedian in France). With his writing partner, Kader Aoun, he produces
scripts as funny as they are political, as his last show, 100 %
Debbouze, recently proved in 2004.
Are comedians poets? The question might have
been set for an A-level paper, then it might be something to include in
a dissertation on Raymond Devos, the Belgian comic that everyone
believes is French. Who better, indeed, to twist the French language
every which way, to play with the rhythm of sentences and the meanings
of words as he launches into barmy or surreal stories? There are few
other candidates, if any, and to convince yourself of how far Devos is
ahead of the game, all you need do is think about one of his most
baroque aphorisms, taken from a sketch called I’m a fool: “He has given
me proof of his foolishness with such intelligence and subtlety that I
wonder if he doesn’t take me for a fool!” Did someone say poet of the
absurd?
The duo Pierre Palmade and Michèle Laroque play on the hypocrisies and random events of life as a couple.
Started by the Guy Bedos-Sophie Daumier
comedy duo in the mid 1970s, sending up everyday life came back into
fashion in the mid 1980s, boosted by Sylvie Joly and Alex Métayer. But
it was really Pierre Palmade, an acid and lucid commentator on those
endless family reunions and exhausting days spent in the car going on
holiday who delivered the funniest approach to it. Alone, or alongside
Muriel Robin and Michèle Laroque for some fearsome male-female verbal
ping-pong, in just under ten years Palmade created a typical profile of
all those annoying mothers-in-law, all those garrulous brothers-in-law
and innumerable couples seriously at the end of their tether. His cult
sketches about a family game of Scrabble that degenerates into chaos or
about military service are grating but always accurate pictures of the
human comedy.
With a slight stretch of the imagination, you
can see the beginnings of French style deadpan humour in The Lettres
persanes [The Persian Letters] (1721) in which Montesquieu, through the
fictional correspondance of two Persian lords travelling around France,
wrote a genuine satire of the political and social mores of his day.
Today’s exponents of the genre are called “Les Grolandais”. Based on an
imaginary small country, the “présipauté” [an uneducated
mispronounciation of the French for principality] of Groland, with a
weekly television news programme on the pay-TV channel (Canal+),
Grolandais journalists, led by Moustic and special correspondant
Michael Kaël, a caricature of a spineless and complacent journalist,
embodied by Benoît Delépine (once a “Guignols” scriptwriter), blow the
lid off current affairs in France, and fire savage and absurd brickbats
at narrow-minded French and global responses.
Since Jacques Tati’s films (Mon oncle [My Uncle] (1958), Les Vacances de M. Hulot
[Monsieur Hulot’s Holiday] (1953)), we know that France loves to poke
fun at ludicrous situations that put gangling and disorientated
characters on stage, as unsuspecting heroes of circumstances verging on
disaster.
Using body language rather than words,
today’s exponent of this very visual humour is Gad Elmaleh, a young
Moroccan comedian and direct heir to Tati who, in his shows, films and
television appearances, exhibits an incredible flexibility. Supple and
irresistible, Elmaleh talks in a style a bit like a stand-up comedian
about the cultural adjustments he has made since he left his native
Casablanca. Creator of a kind of post-modern burlesque, using both
action and words, he has become one of the most popular actors in
France and recently triumphed in Chouchou (2003), a film adaptation of
the life of one of the characters of his second stage show, La Vie moderne [Modern Life].
L’Utopitre, one of Marc
Jolivet’s latest shows, summed up to perfection the special position he
occupies on the French comedy scene. Both gentle dreamer and committed
activitist, this mock innocent constructs in every one of his sketches
a sort of almost perfect world, which could come into being if only a
grain of sand didn’t systematically clog the machine to bring it all
tumbling down. Master of the funny face in his greatest work, La Caisse de tuiles
[The box of tiles], a small monument to pure comedy which transposes
the myth of Sisyphus to the world of building (or the misadventures of
a man in the clutches of a recalcitrant pulley), Jolivet has also
become a caustic chronicler of the ecological and financial downward
spirals of the globalised world and injustices of all kinds, always
cloaking his harangues with a gentle madness. Stand up, all Utopitres!
Source: France-Diplomatie