Is there a bad place to broach a big topic with your lover? Obviously not, at least not for Phil Roy’s blonde. It was while they were visiting the Wool Museum together, somewhere in Italy, that she asked him: “Do you want children?” » The question will become the red thread of Philouthe comedian’s second show.
Posted yesterday at 11:08 a.m.
To this question, the young thirty-year-old will send him another, even more important one: “Do you trust me to have children? ” In effect. How can an eternal teenager like him, who struggles to curb his consumption of small canned juices, one day become a figure of authority in the eyes of his offspring?
Answer: his father and mother, despite the superhero-like confidence they displayed throughout his childhood, were no better equipped than him. No one is sufficiently equipped to face such an unpredictable event as that of parenthood. Parents are ordinary people, Phil Roy once realized. And being ordinary, he admits it himself: this is an area in which he excels.
His second show, however, is not at all. With Sir, in 2017, the comedian revealed the extent of his comic palette in an essentially light tone, through a series of stories drawn from his youth. In Philouwhich premiered on Wednesday evening at the Olympia, Phil Roy reconnects with some of the colors of his first tour when he borrows the voice of a high school concierge, or when he imitates his father who leaves him a voice message, vignettes with which he punctuates his monologue with maximum effect.
PHOTO PHILIPPE BOIVIN, SPECIAL COLLABORATION
Phil Roy, in a moment of complicity with a spectator
These crazy passages, based on the familiarity of what he depicts, would be enough for no one to claim to be reimbursed when they left the theaters, but would not on their own have allowed Phil Roy to rise above of the melee. The impressive leap that separates Sir of Philou is reminiscent of the one Louis-José Houde made between his first show and his second, Follow the parade (2008). Houde was also in his early thirties at the time and was also carrying out a first life assessment, measuring his own achievements against what his parents had accomplished at the same age.
It is also in Follow the parade that Louis-José Houde dared for the first time less spontaneously funny themes. Phil Roy, father of an 11-week-old daughter, allows himself in Philou to invest his own vulnerability, not to draw tears to his audience, but to root his laughter in denser emotional material.
Each of his anecdotes thus transcends its anecdotal aspect, without sacrificing its comicality. When the comedian finds himself with his father in a dangerous district of Detroit, it is this first moment when a son sees beyond the armor of his father that Phil Roy testifies. When he revisits the romantic comedies of his adolescence, it is to describe their deleterious effects on the sentimental imagination of a young man in need of affection.
And when he broaches the painful subject of perinatal bereavement, it is not to provoke one of those “touching moments” to which some of his colleagues rely for convenience, but for the sake of truth. Phil Roy said in an interview with The Press to have allowed himself small segments without joke, which is not exactly a lie, although the assertion seems exaggerated.
The gags fuse throughout Philou at a fast pace, except during very brief interludes during which the comedian gives the audience time to take in what he has just said.
Charismatic, endearing, quick-witted; Québec comedians who present major tours are people endowed with exceptional talent, which sometimes manifests itself on stage through a certain laziness. What’s the point of struggling to lay a relevant text, when the slightest of our grimaces alone triggers hilarity?
Philou is on the contrary the perfect example of a show in which an artist builds on his strengths – an ease in evoking archetypes in a few voice inflections, an ease in making contact with the public – then gives them a real work of introspection as well as a desire to say something about life and the world around it.
The irony will not escape anyone: his first show was called Sirbut it is with his second solo that Phil Roy really becomes one.
Philou
On tour everywhere in Quebec