Some have only three steps to take to get on stage. Félix Brousseau, for his part, had to fight differently to reach the stage: recovering from the mourning of a beloved grandfather, making peace with a stormy paternal relationship, then going through an adolescence spent in a youth center. With Major and LibArtéhis second solo show, the budding comedian, barely 18 years old, invites us to explore this baggage to laugh about it rather than cry about it.
From childhood, Félix Brousseau had one certainty in his young life: wanting to win his own through humor. A “different” child by his own admission, sometimes the victim of mockery from his classmates because of his originality, he set foot in adolescence without suspecting the turbulence that awaited him around the corner.
“At 12, I lost my grandfather to ALS, amyotrophic lateral sclerosis,” he recalls. “I wouldn’t be the man I am today without him. My grandfather was my ally, a second father to me.”
This mourning accentuates another, that of a broken relationship with his father. “I always wanted to be close to my father, but in the end, it never came to anything,” the son says soberly. “There were big, big tensions at home. It was rarely positive with him, to the point where, one day, the youth center had to be called in.”
Félix Brousseau spent four years in this strict framework, surrounded by educators whom he now calls his “mothers” and a daily life that was not always easy to laugh at.
“I was in the quietest unit, but things were hectic sometimes,” he remembers. “We had a schizophrenic, a guy with Tourette’s syndrome, a guy who’s a rapist, another who’s a criminal… Then there was me, the little creative comedian. That clashed A little. “
If you had asked me a year ago if I was able to talk about all this, I’m not sure I would have said yes.
His unit was called “The Odyssey.” A name that seems predestined today given the journey the young man had to undertake to take him from his childhood dream to the stage.
“Humor literally saved my life”
“If you had asked me a year ago if I was able to talk about all this, I’m not sure I would have said yes,” admits Félix Brousseau. “Last year, I really wanted to do sketches about what I was going through, but I said, ‘OK, no.’ I may have only been 17, but I was mature enough to understand that it was going to turn less into a comedy show than into therapy — and that was far from being a good idea!”
Today, hindsight allows him to ” tougher 30 minutes” on a stage joking about his own past. “I’ll never be able to do that for hours and hours,” explains the young comedian. I want to believe that it’s better to laugh about it than to cry about it, but I won’t hide the fact that it’s not that easy even today.”
His second solo effort, presented in Lévis and Trois-Rivières for two nights only, draws on his own journey, but also on the daily life of a young person his age who works in the hotel industry, an inexhaustible source of “nuggets”, according to him.
Now an adult and “freed” from the center where he says he has “some bad memories, but mostly good ones,” Félix Brousseau has made his nest in Trois-Rivières. He has a microphone at the Lévis community radio station, he is preparing the second season of Brou-Show on MAtv and he is preparing to present his second solo – as many doors that he himself has broken down, with the temerity of someone to whom life has given few gifts.
“When I was younger, humor literally saved my life,” he emphasizes. Today, it still allows him to lighten a bundle that is still heavy to carry at times, through laughter.
“I mainly make humor based on observations. Through my own experiences, I try to approach things in a way that people can identify with. My audience is as much young people my age as people from other generations.”
After all, his story touches on the universal: that of a childhood dream that refuses to fade, against all odds.