He had to answer the call of his first loves of humor. After more than 30 years of career, José Gaudet presents his first solo show, It’s about time!the opportunity for the loudmouth to tell his truth.
José Gaudet had not set foot in the offices of The Press since the early 1990s when he worked for Prime Minister Robert Bourassa as an “advance man,” a sort of personal assistant. A job he landed after accepting a summer job helping a chief of staff move.
During these few years, young José was sometimes given the task of going to collect the newspapers in the evening, at DutyAt Montreal Journal and to The Pressand to read them on the phone to the head of government, when he was abroad.
“The first time I did it, it was because the lady who usually did that was nowhere to be found,” he says. “I was in a phone booth on Rue Notre-Dame, my voice was shaking. And Mr. Bourassa said to me: ‘This page, this newspaper, what’s the title?’ Then I threw the newspaper on the ground. What I didn’t know was that once we had gone through all the newspapers, Mr. Bourassa was going to ask me: ‘Okay, can you go back to this article and read it to me in full?’ I wanted to die.”
José Gaudet has his face in his hands. “But I opted for the truth. He found it funny. And I got on all fours on the ground to find the article.”
Follow your instinct
Making people laugh by telling the truth is also the ambition of It’s about time!his first solo show, more than 30 years after graduating from the National School of Humor in 1993.
We’re in the middle of the interview and José Gaudet suddenly starts asking himself questions. “I’d been trying to reason with myself for two years,” he recalls, speaking of his contract as co-host of It ends the week well to VAT.
PHOTO MARTIN CHAMBERLAND, THE PRESS
Comedian José Gaudet
I kept saying to myself, “Jose, you have a good job, you’ve won trophies, you have money, you have a good life, you’re healthy, you have two beautiful children who aren’t into drugs. You got it, your pass on the palette. Everything is perfect. Why do you have to swear that?”
Jose Gaudet
An answer as simple as it is implacable: “I am incapable of not listening to my feelings, of not following my instinct,” says the man who, in April 2022, despite a friendship of rare intensity with his co-host and “buddy” Julie Bélanger, chose to leave television to return to his first love of comedy.
No question of becoming one of those undead that the small screen is too populated with. “I received my research files and it assaulted me to read them. The call was stronger than anything. It haunted me.”
What did José dream of becoming as a child? “I said I wanted to become a scientist and my mother was very proud, but my scientist was the one Jerry Lewis plays in The Nutty Professor “, he recalls, bursting into his legendary sea lion laugh, which still often resounds on the airwaves of Rythme au microphone de It’s 4 o’clock somewhere.
A lot of people thought I made that laugh up, but when they hear my family, they know it’s not fake. You don’t want to sit next to us at a restaurant. In our house, we don’t laugh, we scream.
Jose Gaudet
“But it also comes from the Tannants,” he adds. “It took me a while to realize that like the Tannants, all my life, I worked while laughing. Les Grandes Gueules was a derivative to the power of a thousand, on nitroglycerin, of the Tannants.”
The sweet prison of the Big Mouths
His Shirley Théroux (or his Joël Denis) will be Mario Tessier, his steadfast friend since the 2e secondary school, with whom he joined “because at the Christmas show, I had been better than him and at the spring show, he had been better than me, and rather than staying injured, we decided to support each other.”
PHOTO ANDRÉ PICHETTE, LA PRESSE ARCHIVES
José Gaudet and Mario Tessier, in April 2015
From the fall of 1993 to May 2015 (with a break from May 2007 to January 2010), Les Grandes Gueules were the kings of the comeback on Énergie, winning the title of the most listened-to show in Canada for six consecutive years. An unparalleled radio domination that would also become a kind of sweet prison for them.
“When we wanted to leave, we were criticized for it,” he recalls, recalling their tour. Accomplices of 2008, for which they had initially put their characters away, before repatriating them, in the face of strong recriminations from their followers.
Until last May, José Gaudet ruled out the idea of inviting his characters on stage, only to finally give in, in the name of the pleasure they provide to former listeners of Les Grandes Gueules, as well as to their offspring, for whom Jocelyne Top-Modèle and Demi Lévesque are endearing extras from the country of their childhood, always present on the way home from school.
“And the reaction to this little five-, six-minute medley is fas-ci-nan-te,” the 53-year-old exclaims, clearly moved. “I can’t believe it made such an impression on people.”
Make peace
But beyond this brief wink, It’s about time! his first one-man show, is announced as a proverbially personal show, with as its main subject the beauties and pitfalls of intergenerational transmission.
“My forties allowed me to understand and cure the bugs of my youth,” summarizes José Gaudet, including those generated by a father who, upon learning that his son wanted to become a comedian, threw the following astonishing sentence at him: “Come on, little ass, you can’t do that. Artists are all faggots.”
“I was never very close to my father, I never held a grudge against him either, but I still had to deal with all that,” he explains. “That’s why I’m in my fifties with sore knees, yes, like everyone else, but having made peace with who I am and where I come from.” It’s never too late to take your time.
At the Cinquième Salle of Place des Arts on September 30 and on tour throughout Quebec
Check out his show dates