In September 2024, Yvon Deschamps will star in the first of a series of shows entitled Yvon Deschamps tells The Shop.
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But make no mistake. The tongue of the famous comedian will have been washed with bleach and spectators will see it on a big screen rather than in person.
Only crumbs will remain of his legendary monologues from the 1970s and 1980s on “fags”, on the disabled, on the boss of the shop or on women’s liberation. We can forget “Nigger Black! Nigger Black!“, when we know that Verushka Lieutenant-Duval, lecturer at the University of Ottawa, or that Wendy Mesley, popular host of The Weekly at the CBC, were stigmatized just for mentioning the title of Pierre Vallières’ book White Negroes of America.
The hundreds of thousands of admirers of Yvon Deschamps, who gathered for months at the Théâtre Maisonneuve at the Place des Arts, remember laughing heartily when they heard him make fun of the “mummounes that he would spend all of bat’ or women who are the universe of men. They also remember that he concluded that “if you grab a girl’s butt, it’s because you love her” and that he wondered if “we can call disabled people ‘people’ »! Next fall, these admirers will have difficulty recognizing their Yvon.
OTHER TIMES, OTHER JOKES
Times have changed a lot. The censorship that we thought had disappeared forever is back, more cunning and more widespread than ever. Once the exclusive weapon of baluster eaters and supporters of dictatorships, censorship has also become a weapon of the left-wing intelligentsia and academic elites. Talk to the team of authors who wrote the Bye next Sunday evening, every word of which has been weighed by a battery of lawyers!
Librarians could also tell you some bad news about current censorship. We now have to hide and even burn dozens of books. Tintin is no longer welcome in the Congo and Agatha Christie’s ten little niggers are nothing more than “they”. In the United States, once the country of freedom par excellence, the Republican right, inspired by governors Ron DeSantis and Greg Abbott, is on the same wavelength as the promoters of wokism and cancel culture. They have removed more than 3,000 titles from public libraries since last January.
SECOND DEGREE, DON’T KNOW!
In December, two great American comedy stars passed away: Norman Lear, creator of the famous sitcom All in the Family, and Tom Smothers, who hosted with his brother Dick The Smothers Brothers Comedy Hour, an irreverent show at the origin of Saturday Night Live.
Like Yvon Deschamps, Norman Lear and the Smothers brothers succeeded in breaking taboos and opening up large spaces of freedom on American television. The two Smothers brothers were the CBS equivalent of our Cynics, and Archie Bunker, the star of All in the Family, the equivalent of Yvon Deschamps. Today, none of those would cross the threshold of a television studio, regardless of network.
Far from diminishing, the public’s propensity to not understand the second degree of a statement has increased to the point of reducing the playing field of comedians to nothing. A field on which poor Yvon Deschamps would now almost always be offside.