Invincible Review | Simon Delisle defies expectations

“It’s a machine gun for gags”, launched Mat Lévesque at the end of his first part by presenting the headliner, a sentence which sums up well the ambition of Simon Delisle: to generate laughter in abundance, by not being by giving essentially only a text, without flafla. Its very good show, Invinciblestopped for the first time at Club Soda on Friday evening.

Without scenery or real staging, Simon Delisle practices what could be called meat-potato humour, in the sense that he delivers his jokes without any artifice, weaving his numbers from observations, personal anecdotes and diatribes against our collective docility.

That he earns his living as an author with several of his comrades (Rachid Badouri, Mariana Mazza, Dominic and Martin) will not surprise: the winner of the 2020 edition of the show The next stand-up displays an effective stage presence, but not to break everything. Funny coincidence: The Press was seated on Friday behind Sylvain Larocque, another humorist working behind the scenes and whose stage work has always enjoyed great admiration among his colleagues.

In other words: Simon Deslisle is, as the saying goes, your favorite comedian’s favorite comedian.

“I had the chance to do the School of Humor with Simon Delisle,” wrote Adib Alkhalidey on Twitter in April. “And I stress the word ‘luck’ because it’s been the source of 90% of the giggles I’ve had over the past decade. »

You thought that was what it was, but…

The miseries of confinement, the hypocrisy of certain influencers, the absurdity of training in the gym in an extreme way: Simon Delisle kneads subjects having nothing particularly original, but with a sufficiently oblique look to avoid repeating too many things you would have heard elsewhere.

His main strength is in fact his obviously intimate knowledge of the current humorous landscape. A number on vegetarianism? We have already heard plenty of them, and most of them ridiculed the alleged fragility of those who refuse to eat meat.

Simon Delisle, for his part, pretends for a moment to go down this path, before making a 180 turn°, the better to make fun of these frenzied carnivores who cannot imagine a meal without steak. Clever strategy to thwart our expectations.

A number on the difficulties of fatherhood? “I love having children”, announces the father of a boy and a girl, tired of hearing all these parents at the end of their tether, who only know how to complain about their offspring. And again for his number on his vasectomy, which does not depict the intervention in question as a torture session, which would have been foreseeable, but as the least of the gestures to be made for a man within a heterosexual couple. An approach that we could encapsulate by borrowing this famous phrase from a certain rap group: you thought that was what it was, but that was not what it was.

Like a free man

After devoting a good part of the beginning of the show to the pandemic, Simon Delisle really finds his way by describing everything that keeps members of the middle class in more or less consented enslavement: the government, the employers, the banks. His tone, in his most fulminating tirades, betrays his admiration for the American Bill Burr.

And if the moods of the white man in his thirties are not exactly what moves the most these days, it would be reductive, even erroneous, to liken the rage of Simon Delisle to that of certain animators radio stations, constantly looking for scapegoats on which to vent their frustrations.

Delisle’s indignation actually smolders a call not to make anyone pay, but to invent a daily life that would most closely resemble freedom.

“We should allow ourselves to be disagreeable,” he jokes, referring to all the harmless ways of venting his anger that he has developed and that help him cultivate his own inner peace, even tend towards gratitude.

Gratitude ? It’s that Simon Delisle has been tried by bad luck more than the average 37-year-old guy. Suffering from type 1 diabetes, the comedian concludes his show by listing the extraordinary misfortunes that have befallen him since his arrival on Earth – enough to fill a few episodes of Denis Lévesque’s defunct show. Without highlighting his message, he seems to want to remind us that life is too short to give it without resistance to someone other than yourself and those you love.

And when he admits at the end of the curtain that he feels invincible when he is on stage, it is obvious that he is describing less a feeling of power that the microphone would give him than this inalienable joy that allows him to taste the art of stand upsomething like the illusion of being completely free.

Invincible

On tour everywhere in Quebec

7.5/10