“The best way not to become my boyfriend, warns Patrick Huard, is to start a sentence with ‘young people today…'” Conversation with a humorist you won’t hear say… that we can no longer say nothing.
Patrick Huard knows all about the close-knit session represented by a Bye, and the risks of falling that it entails. Already, in 2003, he embodied Pierre Karl Péladeau in Séraphin Poudrier in This is not a bye byea sketch that earned its author Louis Morissette to end up on the blacklist of the press magnate.
Nervous, approaching his first participation in the year-end review as a member of his official cast? A little, but only insofar as “no one wants to make a bad Bye “, he said during a long interview with The Press.
But Patrick Huard has not felt at all in recent months that the creators of the traditional meeting of December 31 were driving with one foot on the brake. His code of conduct regarding his impersonations? “If I’m not in a hurry to show a sketch to the person I play, I don’t do it”, confides the actor, specifying of course that this rule excludes our leaders, who, “they, often, the deserve”.
We can be wrong, we are not infallible, but people want us to take risks. If we are too cushy, we will be told, if we go too far, we will be told. It’s like in F1: you want the driver to pass as close as possible to the wall. Even sometimes, the world doesn’t hate it, a little crash.
Patrick Huard
He thus refuses to embrace the discourse of those who claim that the room for maneuver of this kind of program, and comedians in general, has narrowed. “If you go on social media, you will believe that the whole population thinks that this or that is not being said, but in the street, this is not what is happening, he observes. Freedom of expression for comedians has not changed; there’s just people who have raised their hands to argue that there’s a way to say the things that hurt them, and that’s okay. »
A sensitivity that does not mean that he believes that certain subjects should be bypassed. “When you don’t talk about someone or a group, in humor, you ostracize them, you think they are too fragile. If you have affection for the person you’re making fun of, I think anything can pass. »
LOL and young people
Patrick Huard pilots from January 6 on Prime Video LOL – Who will laugh lasta Japanese format available in a dozen markets, based on a concept as simple as it is exhilarating: for six hours, ten elite comedians, caught in a single large room, must resist the urge to giggle, thereby providing even to viewers a rare concentrate of pure (and sometimes purely childish) laughter.
“As soon as I was pitched the idea, I said to myself: why didn’t I think of it myself before? “, recalls the host of these six episodes starring Marie-Lyne Joncas, Rachid Badouri, Yves P. Pelletier, Arnaud Soly, Christine Morency, Laurent Paquin, Richardson Zéphir, Virginie Fortin, Mathieu Dufour and Edith Cochrane.
PHOTO CHARLES WILLIAM PELLETIER, THE PRESS
Part of the distribution of LOL : Mathieu Dufour, Yves P. Pelletier, Arnaud Soly, Richardson Zéphir, Laurent Paquin and Patrick Huard
LOL – Who will have the last laugh? could it bring together this young audience that Quebec productions are struggling to seduce, as we have written a lot this fall? “Of course it’s a subject that concerns me, says Huard, but it’s our fault, this problem. I don’t know what else to say. ” But still ? Our man is visibly discouraged.
If your only response to the fact that young people aren’t interested enough in Quebec culture is to say: Netflix and company are so big, we can’t compete with them, well, let’s close our platforms. If young people are on Netflix, it may be because we talk about them more there than on our platforms.
Patrick Huard
He talks about the success of teen favorite shows like The cottage, Completely high school or the gala Mammoth. “It’s proof that if we challenge them, if we represent them, if we give them the means to tell their stories, young people will be there. »
A cinema lacking in diversity
25 years ago, in December 1997, the first installment of the franchise The Boys took the stage and surpassed at the box office, against all odds, a certain American blockbuster sinking boat. Comedy on skates began a prosperous period for Quebec cinema, both in terms of quality and attendance at theatres.
IMAGE FROM THE FILM THE BOYS (1997), PRESS ARCHIVES
Rémy Girard, Patrick Huard, Patrick Labbé, Marc Messier, Yvan Ponton and Serge Thériault in The Boys (1997)
“I’m part of the gang who worked hard to stop people saying that Quebec cinema sucks,” says Patrick Huard. At the time, the best compliment you could receive was: it’s good… for a Quebec film. But we managed to make people proud of Quebec cinema. And there, now, I have the impression that we have fallen back into the same cursed pattern. »
Without concluding in total disaffection, which the statistics would contradict, the director is sorry for an offer that he considers too little diversified, to which the disconnection of the Gala Québec Cinéma, which he regrets, is perhaps not foreigner. “We don’t make genre films, romantic comedies, biopics! It saddens me that we escape the baton to the big American machine. It’s simple, and I’m tired of repeating it: it takes all kinds of films, because everyone benefits from everyone else’s success. »
Back on stage?
Rub shoulders with comedians on the set of LOL: Who will have the last laugh did he make Patrick Huard want to reconnect with the stage? “I’m starting to have a subject in mind,” drops the one whose last show dates back to 2012. “I would like to speak to my fellow buddies. »
PHOTO LUC-SIMON PERREAULT, PRESS ARCHIVES
Patrick Huard at the Just for Laughs festival in 1993
Those who use the word woke in all sauces? “Yes, as if it were a race of zombies!” [Il éclate de rire.] There is a propaganda around this word that works. We want to demonize that as we wanted to demonize the feminist movement, in another era. What the word woke invites us to do is just to stay awake to what is happening around us. I can understand that it brews some of my fellow buddies. Yes, there can be excesses. But don’t come and tell me: Tsé, young people, today…”
Above all, do not count on Patrick Huard to complain that he can no longer say anything. “It freaks me out, the columnists who spend hours on their multiple platforms saying ‘I can’t say anything’. Man, stop saying you can’t say anything and say something. »
LOL – Who will laugh last ?, starting January 6 on Prime Video