I am a good public and a great consumer of political humor. My favorite caricature concerning me was that of Ygreck in THE Montreal Journal. When I was a minister in the Marois government, he showed us in a car, Pauline at the wheel, backing up while we received a shower of tomatoes. Ygreck made me say: “You see, Pauline, we are unanimous! »
I believe in the right to wickedness in humor. But a simple equation must be respected: the joke must be at least as funny as mean, otherwise it is only mean. More generally, if the humor doesn’t squeal at least a little, it’s not doing its job. The political world, like society and couple relationships, offers material rich in contradictions, paradoxes, lies and hypocrisies that deserve to be exposed by exploiting their comic springs.
It was in this state of mind that I showed up last fall for Guy Nantel’s show “If I understood you correctly, you are saying…”. Back from his defeat in the Parti Québécois leadership race, Nantel was going to break the sugar on the party I had led. I was served. Nantel takes on the stage character of a drooling and condescending know-it-all who lectures us non-stop. But he respects the equation. The meaner it is, the more we laugh, because we also laugh at him, at his smugness. When he exaggerates, we understand that he is exaggerating. (Unless you’re really obtuse, which happens.) We also understand that he doesn’t say the opposite of what he really thinks. He adds to it, that’s all.
Having survived, therefore, the Nantel show, I said to myself that I was ready to face an even tougher test, namely the new Sugar Sammy show. I had the idea of being accompanied by a professional in political humor: Guy Nantel. He found the idea famous and we were happy to laugh at our expense and then meet Sammy in his dressing room to share our giggles with him.
When the show was over, Guy and I got up and, without even exchanging a word, headed for the exit. We had come to the same conclusion. We really did not see how we could pretend, in front of the artist, to have appreciated his performance.
What struck us first was laziness. I estimate at a glance that Sugar Sammy presents only 30% new material compared to his previous show, which I had seen and had, overall, enjoyed. Almost half of the performance is devoted to dialogues with members of the audience, which breaks the rhythm, forces you to listen, and above all frees the comedian from the task of writing texts. In terms of risk-taking, essential in political humor, we can bring back a few jokes about trans people, in the vein opened by Dave Chappelle. Mike Ward, in his show Black, takes a thousand times more risks and gets away with it brilliantly. (Sammy actually pays tribute to it on stage.)
At the end of the show, Sugar claims that he laughs at all the bands equally. If he believes it, he is suffering from a serious attention deficit disorder. When he laughs with an Indian spectator of the severity of their parents, it is a shared humor. When he says of the French present that he finds their accent cheerful, the empathy is less perceptible. (He does a good imitation, we must say.) When he laughs at Americans, Republicans and Democrats (the latter are wokes, the former are nice, but can kill you), the distance is clear.
I wondered, Sugar Sammy having perhaps noted in the first texts criticizing his show that he never laughed at Anglo-Quebecers, if he had corrected the situation by devoting a few minutes to them. No. In an exchange with one of them in the room, he tells him that his French is too good for people from the West Island. Point.
It’s clear: Sugar Sammy puts French speakers in a class of their own. A lower class. And we learn things. In a charge against the so-called feminism of French speakers, he asserts that “no white woman has come to the defense of Joyce Echaquan, Dominique Anglade and Yolande James”. Sammy, living abroad during the ordeal, may not have perceived the huge wave of sympathy that the Echaquan affair has generated. But he would have heard of racist attacks against Anglade and James? Which ones? Intrigued, I looked for what he was talking about, even with English colleagues, without success.
The comedian is not renewed when he says that Francophones speak bad French. This is a common prejudice in the Anglosphere, which he relays with relish. He also says that with this bilingual show that he will present in the region, he will teach us half-wits to speak English well and to speak French well. Our language handicaps are perhaps induced by our listening to French-language television, on which Sammy extends a thick contempt. He invites his English-speaking viewers to listen to TVA in particular to laugh with him at the mediocrity he finds there. When he reminds us that he has won two Oliviers and an Artis trophy, we understand very well that he finds no reason to be proud of being the black sheep of a herd for which he has an attachment. , but rather an opportunity to be hilarious in the face of the happy cuckolds that we are.
Sammy’s first show seemed caustic to the Francos. Was I wrong to find him good-natured? This one struck me as more clearly surly, with uninhibited contempt. Moreover, Sammy warns us at the start of the show that his tour has only one objective: to pay for his chalet. In Ontario. He returns to this theme at the end of the performance. He asks his name to a spectator who answers “Benoît”. “No, Sammy retorts, your name is not Benedict. To me, your name is $80. We don’t doubt it for a moment.
Father, columnist and author, Jean-François Lisée led the PQ from 2016 to 2018. | [email protected] / blog: jflisee.org