Guy Mongrain | Cleaning up Twitter, one pun at a time

“In the instructions for Twitter, no one ever wrote that it was invented only to be indignant, to tear his shirt, to get carried away, bitcher, to be rude and vulgar. »

Dominic Late
The Press

And yet, going for a walk on Twitter most of the time feels like a walk on the banks of the Styx, with tormentors suffering from a severe case of verbal incontinence as guides. Why stay on Twitter, then? By masochism? May be. But also because through all this mire appears a few times a day, like so many comforting lumps of sugar cream, the chirps of Guy Mongrain. Under the avatar @levotot_guy, the host has become over the past year the endearing grandpa, or the comic uncle, of the Quebec twittosphere.

“With the speech that we have been hearing for two years, a snarling, hateful, flat, pocket speech, I said to myself: “Can I, with my humble contribution, lighten the mood a little?” “, says the former morning of TVA, joined by videoconference in his residence in the north of Montreal, where he imagines every day the most hassle-free retirement possible. At the start of the conversation, he excused his somewhat disheveled headdress, a consequence of the happy skiing session from which he had just returned.

A havart man

What do we find on Guy Mongrain’s Twitter feed, which has just over 10,000 subscribers? Jokes much funnier than those of many licensed comedians, including puns of a meteorological nature (“It will be a pharaonic day: Toutenkanuk…”), puns of Olympic caliber (“Andrew will not even bear the title of prince we’re going out…”) as well as little snapshots of his relaxed daily life (“I “binge watch” the wood stove… (C’tu d’even qu’on dit ça?)”).

A long-time disciple of Sol, the 68-year-old gentleman does not conceive any bitterness, on the contrary, at being associated in the popular Quebec imagination with this unloved art – the pun – that a miserable character from the Miserables of Victor Hugo qualifies, with great severity, as “droppings of the flying spirit”.

“It’s been since I was young that as soon as I hear something, it makes images in my head, remembers Guy Mongrain. At the time of Hi hello, I had very spirited collaborators. I will always remember Jules Roiseux, the wine and cheese columnist. It featured gouda, camembert and havarti. And then, of course, I was saying, “A havarti cheese is worth two.” I don’t know how it happens, it just comes to me! »

Don’t want obligations

Guy Mongrain’s interventions on Twitter also draw the outlines of what looks like a specially cozy retired life, almost a dream life. Tweevage of the Sainte-Flanelle parties, detailed list of songs playing at home in the evening, nice photos of his pre-pandemic trips to Africa or Asia: the host obviously still likes to communicate, but is not at all bored with the focus of the camera.

“My main line today is not to run after the exhibition. I had a lot of them, I’m overjoyed and I’m elsewhere,” said the man who submitted the competitors for the last time. The goose that lays golden eggs to the Cornelian dilemma of the chicken or the egg in June 2018. “My happiness is to have the wealth of choice, to say yes if I feel like it, and no if I don’t. “He confides having refused a television collaboration at the beginning of the summer of 2020. “I do not want to have any obligations”, he drops with astonishing equanimity for someone who for 41 years has glimpsed his reflection in the addictive mirror of mass media, a mirror that often seems painful to renounce.

It was in June 2004 that he left – his decision – the bar of Hi hello. “The idea caught on, especially when Claire Lamarche announced that she was retiring from the airwaves after 12 years on the daily. I was then told: “You are the last old man of the old!” “, he had explained at this time to the colleague Isabelle Massé. Old of the old? Guy Mongrain was then… 51 years old (and 65 in 2018, when he took full retirement). Didn’t Bob Barker hold his slender mic until he was 83? Didn’t Alex Trebek pilot Jeopardy almost to the end of his life?

Guy Mongrain thinks out loud. “There may be a greater respect among Americans for aging people on screen. We are perhaps a little more intransigent here. We always need new faces and that’s normal, I played by those rules for 41 years. »

The author’s grandmother, Cora, 93, nevertheless remains convinced that the absence of her Guy (note the possessive adjective) at the helm of her Chicken is just a parenthesis. The main interested party bursts out laughing. “I don’t want to upset anyone, especially Cora, but I’m out of business here. Guy remembers a Serge Reggiani concert during which the singer’s dental prosthesis had moved. “I don’t want to become that. The drama that we experienced in the CHSLDs confronted me with my own aging. »

The humility of the gentleman honors him, of course, although it remains difficult not to regret the reassuring television company of Guy Mongrain, at a time when our media ecosystem has never appeared so hysterical. The secret to a screen presence that soothes the viewer? “Be really there, be listening. I often repeated this sentence: “You have two ears and one mouth. Whatever profession you practice in communication, if your mouth works twice as well as your ears, you are in trouble. »

Guy Mongrain, well of wisdom? Our chatter will in any case have revealed a bonze of serenity, well educated in the peace of mind that comes with letting go “I’ve always dreamed of being a wise old man and today, I finally have time to think, to drop me off, to be a lot more, shall we say… cool. I get a lot less upset about things that aren’t worth it. Unlike almost everyone on Twitter.