“It’s irresponsible to be here”, launches Simon Gouache to the members of the public, two thirds of his third show, congratulating them for having taken the risk of buying a ticket, without knowing if the comedian with whom they came to spend the evening is still funny. A risk that will have been amply rewarded on Tuesday evening.
For a long time, Simon Gouache woke up late, one of the inestimable advantages of the life of a comedian. Get up at eight o’clock? Only farmers submit to such ordeal, he believed. It was of course before Simon Gouache became a father.
It was also before Simon Gouache discovered “the best show in the history of television”, Hi hello. With a mixture of teasing irony and authentic disbelief, the comedian offers a curtain-raiser reconstruction of all that the TVA morning show is surreal, an explosive departure worthy of this CrossFit number which revealed at the Just for Laughs festival in 2017.
Tuesday evening, at the Olympia, it started strong. Very strong. And if there really were people who thought they had taken a risk in getting a ticket, their fears had all subsided after those first ten minutes of anthology, which alone are worth the price of admission.
With this third show called LiveSimon Gouache therefore returns to the modus operandi of his first two tours: perfecting a classic, almost conventional humor, but embodying the best possible version of it.
The big band music to the sound of which he took to the stage already offered a good indication of the tradition in which he fits: that of a refined stand-up, which he combines with a turbo-energetic way of living space and to show several of the situations in which his acts are rooted, without ever looking like someone running around everywhere. Simon Gouache moves with such ease that you almost forget that he never stays in one place for longer than thirty seconds.
Put end to end, his subjects look like a caricature of a Quebec comedy show, whether it’s a question of histrionics at the National Assembly, the dangers of downhill skiing or the challenges of parenthood. A problem ? It would probably be elsewhere, but not here.
Although he sometimes deconstructs certain received ideas (on dating applications, in particular), it is less thanks to particularly original flashes or surprising opinions that Simon Gouache keeps his distance from banality, than thanks to his precise (and precisely hilarious) way of formulating his ideas and letting no thread stick out.
A question of rhythm
Unlike many of his comrades, Simon Gouache is not really a storyteller, even if several of his acts are nourished by his own daily life as a young father of two children, who has recently moved to the suburbs, after having spent all his living in Montreal.
PHOTO MARTIN CHAMBERLAND, THE PRESS
Simon Gouache
Between observation and social satire, the 38-year-old comedian weaves his red thread through situations having in common his character as a guy jealous of his comfort, faced with his many shortcomings when he meets his new neighbors, very manually gifted, or when he accompanies his lover to a gourmet restaurant.
One more word and Simon Gouache could sometimes overplay the nono, even pass for reaction, precipices that he avoids by often recalling to be aware that the problem is him, and not the others. “It’s important to be open to novelty,” he repeats, one of the luminous leitmotifs of his text, which nevertheless has the elegance of suggesting its messages, rather than highlighting them.
His knowledge of the mechanisms and the history of humor obviously serves him well and just when one would like to reproach him for making fun of his lover a little too much (whom he nevertheless has the elegance to name by her first name in order to avoid reducing her to an archetypal beast), the cozy thirty-year-old returns to his own shortcomings, to his own anxieties.
For those who have been lucky enough to attend a running-in performance of Live last September, it was particularly fascinating to see how what was then a very good show is now an almost perfect show, a gap that is very much due to a great mastery of silences and rhythm, as well as to this smile that kills, Gouache’s secret weapon.
“It’s old what we’re doing here”, he marvels towards the end of the evening, celebrating this singular tradition which consists of meeting in the same room in order to let a stranger try to entertain us. His show is simply called Live not out of laziness, but because there are few more powerful ways to feel alive than to laugh so much.
Live
On tour everywhere in Quebec