25 years ago, Jean-Thomas Jobin appeared like an alien in the Quebec comedy landscape with his extremely absurd style. The quirky and stoic character of his beginnings gradually gives way to his true personality on stage. Its new one man show is undoubtedly his most intimate in his career, his most accessible also by force of circumstances, but the winner of the first season of Big Brother Celebrities does not denature either. Let his early admirers rest assured: he will never be as mainstream as Martin Matte or Louis-José Houde.
“Yes, I tell more things that are taken from my reality in this show. If it’s my most accessible show, so much the better, but it doesn’t come from a desire to broaden my audience. It starts from a desire to take a risk. I don’t want to be lazy and redo what I’ve already done. It may seem paradoxical, but putting myself in danger makes me feel safer,” explains Jean-Thomas Jobin, who is naturally anxious.
This new one man show, like the three previous ones, follows a fundamentally absurd thread. As evidenced by the title, Ten strict thirty teas one, a play on words in the purest “Jobinian” tradition in which no hidden meaning should be seen. There simply isn’t any.
But some elements of this new show come less out of nowhere. Like the passages about the deaths of his parents, which occurred a few months apart. Or about the anxiety that gnaws at the idea of growing old.
“When my parents were alive, I was afraid of death. I was afraid of putting them through the loss of a child. Today, death no longer scares me. But growing old remains a great source of anxiety. I don’t like knowing that I have less left in front than in the back. Deep down, I don’t feel like I’m the age I am. I still feel like a kid,” confides the comedian, who doesn’t look his 48 years old.
A more mature kid
It would have been inconceivable for him at the start of his career to indulge in this way. When he started in the profession, Jean-Thomas Jobin was content to play someone else on stage, telling each other the craziest jokes in a monotonous and falsely detached tone. Even in interviews, he did not deviate from this stage alter ego.
“I didn’t allow myself to get out of character because I told myself that people wouldn’t believe me if I went back to it on stage. But eventually I realized that I was a little too by the book. Most people understand that sometimes I act and what I say is not true. While other times, I really talk about my reality,” he notes in hindsight.
For a person as modest as him, this shell had the merit of protecting him for a long time from outside eyes, from unhealthy curiosities about his private life and from all the inconveniences that come with this stardom that he loathes.
Because Jean-Thomas Jobin never dreamed of being in the spotlight. Big fan of Seinfield and of The end of the world is at 7 o’clock, he enrolled at the National School of Humor at the end of the 1990s to train as an author, and not as a comedian. But the director, Louise Richer, will have grasped its full potential during the audition.
“I had never done humor. I had never done improv. My only experience was being in drama class in secondary 5. I was terribly embarrassed. When I gave oral presentations, I hid my hands and shook. But ultimately, I knew that I would be the best at interpreting my texts. I just needed to be pushed,” says the man who, even on the cusp of fifty, remains somewhere like this reserved teenager, a thousand miles from other comedians with extroverted personalities.
A natural transition
His character, in some way, gave him the courage to go on stage at the start of his career. Then the podcasts, where he is a recurring guest, gradually forced him to step out of the role he had given himself. Until then, very little was known about him, other than the fact that he worshiped reality TV. Survivor. Today, he agrees to open up about his life as a single childless person or about his morbid embarrassment with the aim of laughing about it later.
His participation in the first season of the reality TV Big Brother Celebrities, in 2021, also had the effect of cracking the armor a little more. “You can’t play a character for 90 days when you’re locked in a house and filmed almost constantly. Let’s say my character cracked. It wouldn’t have been natural to resume my character as if nothing had happened. My absurd character is still there in this show. But when I talk about things that actually happened to me, I’m more sarcasm than absurd. This is how I am in life,” he sums up.