“Santa Claus is garbage” passes the milestone of quarantine and has not finished making us laugh

Forty years ago already to the day, Santa Clause is garbage was released in French cinemas. A wacky comedy by Jean-Marie Poiré adapted from the eponymous play created in 1979 at the Parisian theater Le Splendid. The story of one Christmas evening when the team of the association SOS Détresse Friendship finds itself interrupted by the intrusion of marginal and eccentric characters, causing disasters on the chain. An hour and a half of burlesque and comic situations with schoolboy humor and a very irreverent tone for a Christmas show.

On screen, we find the troupe of Splendid, Thierry Lhermitte in the role of Pierre, Anémone in Thérèse, Marie-Anne Chazel in ubiquitous Zézette, Gérard Jugnot in Félix, Christian Clavier (Katia) and Josiane Balasko (Mme Musquin). When it was released in 1982, 1.5 million spectators came to see the film in theaters. But critical reception has been mixed. Harder, cinemas change the title considered too provocative in Santa Claus is almost garbagewhile the RATP simply refuses to promote the feature film in the metro.

But if this comedy has become a classic, it is largely thanks to its multiple reruns on television in the run-up to the holiday season. The scathing and crude replies quickly become cult. Among them, the laconic “Yes this is it” Stone. Katia’s stroke of blood, “you are short-sighted in the eyes, short-sighted in the heart and short-sighted in the ass!”. But also, the secret recipe for the inedible Preskovitch chestnut kloug, “yes, it’s handmade, it’s hand rolled under the armpits“. We owe the idea of ​​the kloug to Josiane Balasko. The actress during a trip to Croatia in her father’s childhood city, tasted delicious pastries and imagined inventing a filthy one.

The Splendid team will continue the pranks together on screen in schoolboy comedies that have become cult, like the trilogy of tanned and of Grandpa resists. Gradually in the 80s, the actors separate and develop individual projects. Some will end up on screen like Christian Clavier, Marie-Anne chazelin Visitors in 1993 also became an unmissable French comedy.