Review of Mouton by Mehdi Bousaidan | From one subject to another

SheepMehdi Bousaidan’s second show, often borders on banality, as it is so disheveled.

Mehdi Bousaidan is about a third of the way through his show when he gets to why his new tour is called Sheepremembering the day when, when he was still just an amazed child, his father took him to a sheep breeder to ask him to choose one of the animals, which they would take home.

Poor little Mehdi thought he was going home with a nice pet, he will instead leave the sheepfold with meat: this is the case with the Muslim festival of Eid, during which, traditionally, a sheep is sacrificed.

Since that time, the 32-year-old comedian has had a lot of “difficulty making decisions,” he explained Thursday evening at the Olympia during his media premiere, a rich vein that he will immediately abandon this story of youth over. Mehdi Bousaidan immediately moves on to another subject, the pandemic, about which, at this stage, we must have supremely original things to say if we wish not to repeat what has already been heard too many times. times.

Same remark regarding his segment on the attacks of September 11, 2001. Although there is no doubt that, for a teenager of Arab origin, this tragedy is associated with trauma and the memory of ostracization, he It is necessary, almost 23 years later, to offer a singular, or particularly intimate, reading of these events to transcend the heavy impression of repetition.

Return to his sheep

Certainly, the majority of comedy shows in Quebec are made up of a patchwork of acts that do not necessarily have any connection between them. But that of Mehdi Bousaidan has the effect of a show that would have been written by a thousand different comedians, as it struggles to find its own identity.

While the beginning of the show, during which he protests against the recent announcement of the renovation of the roof of the Olympic Stadium, suggests that he wishes to reinvent himself as a current affairs commentator (with a certain effectiveness, especially when we take taking into account that the announcement in question dates from this week), the sequel oscillates between hackneyed observations, everyday anecdotes and poorly assumed provocations.

The comedian pulls on an infinity of threads, always to better immediately abandon them, moving without real logic from his visits to Costco to his relationship with nature, from transgender athletes to the ordinary contempt of Parisians for Quebecers, from the pronoun iel to the popularity of TV shows true crime.

He jumps from rooster to donkey, never returning to his sheep.

But where is Mehdi hiding?

Mehdi Bousaidan, however, is far too talented for this show to turn into a disaster. He is perhaps, in reality, one of the comedians of his generation with the greatest raw talent. But he uses this talent more as a crutch than as a springboard, using his act outs (these sketches where he shows a situation that he has just described) as an insurance policy allowing him to generate laughter after having thrown out conventional lines about the inefficiency of self-service checkouts or digital addiction.

He also uses another good old crutch consisting of bringing out a crazy, but little-known, event from the news, in order to get a few laughs, in this case, the story of the Spanish handibasket team which, at the Paralympic Games , presented a lineup made up of 10 players (out of 12) not disabled at all. When is this story from? Sydney Games in… 2000!

Evoking the famous list of relationships of sexual predator Jeffrey Epstein is based on a similar process: Bousaidan will ultimately only use it in order to set the table for a needlessly degrading joke about the late physicist Stephen Hawking which, it is said by the way, has not been charged with any crime.

No one asks all comedians to turn their show into a session of introspection or excavation of the depths of their soul. But Mehdi Bousaidan is so absent from his own show, even from his apparently more personal numbers, that it is difficult to come to any other conclusion than this: this new tour responds to no other necessity than that of simply going back on tour.

What’s the point of mentioning that he just got married, except to garner applause and say nothing about this major moment in one’s life? Why offer support to striking teachers, if only to pander to the audience and add nothing to the collective conversation about education?

Mehdi Bousaidan always says what his audience wants to hear while his audience, or at least the author of this text, would like to hear what he has to say. So much so that, for the moment, he looks more like a Panurge sheep than a five-legged sheep.

Sheep

On tour throughout Quebec

5/10