The pretext is deliberately simplistic: knowing that, in France, everything is right-wing (Peugeot cars, vacations on the Côte d’Azur, playing golf, reading Figaro, etc.) or left-wing (Renault cars, vacations in Brittany, practicing hiking, reading Libération…), let’s apply this binary classification to comedians, in order to verify the adage “tell me what makes you laugh, I’ll tell you who you vote for”, subtitle of this evening’s documentary.
Starting, arbitrarily and to cite just one example, with Coluche and Thierry Le Luron, immensely popular from the mid-1970s, after having started, for the first, at the café-théâtre, for the second, as an imitator.
To respond, a panel of speakers. First of all two particularly relevant historians, Pascal Ory (of the French Academy) and François Cusset, historian of ideas, just like the sociologist Nelly Quemener, perched on a high stool. Then many comedians and two political personalities invited for reasons that remain to be clarified: the former deputy (Let’s resist!) Jean Lassalle and the ecologist deputy Sandrine Rousseau.
” Politically correct “
The latter praises “Coluche’s subversive humor”, obviously left-wing. Comforted by Franjo: “Hitting the police is left-wing. » Except that, for the (left-wing) journalist Jean-François Kahn, “if we want to classify [Coluche], we must put him among the unclassifiable.” Before giving way to the same procrastination about Thierry Le Luron. “It’s not because we’re on the left that we don’t laugh at right-wing comedians,” assures Sandrine Rousseau.
The “investigation for laughs” continues in chronological chapters, all introduced by interludes which could have been fewer in order to leave more room for extracts from sketches – Guy Bedos, Blanche Gardin, Haroun, Les Inconnus, Jamel Debbouze, Gad Elmaleh.
The interventions make people smile, but not only. “Humour makes you laugh and think,” recalls Sébastien Thoen, when François Cusset quotes the philosopher Gilles Deleuze: “Power wants us to be sad”, because a sad people would be easier to lead. Further on, Frédéric Fromet, who has appeared in France Inter’s press review every morning, “in complete freedom”, for a decade, recalls the violence of the reactions after singing Coulibaly, Coulibalo in 2015 – after the attacks: “Ah ! Ah! Allah akbar, you have nothing in the calbar! (…) The madmen of Allah are losers,” he quipped.
Talking about the evolution of society inevitably leads to discussing the arrival of the first female comedians, then that of comedians from minorities, leading straight to “political correctness”. No longer making fun of foreign accents, is this human progress or a regression in freedom of expression? “Let’s start by being happy about it,” suggests François Cusset.