Seven years after leaving Quebec for France, Sugar Sammy is back with his new one-man show You’re gonna laugh 2, a second bilingual show for the comedian, who has the ambition to reconcile “the two solitudes”. But if that is his intention, why always make fun of just one of them?
Sugar Sammy, who nevertheless boasts of laughing at everyone in this show, in fact completely spares English speakers, who represented about half of the public who had moved Friday evening to the Salle Pierre-Mercure for the Montreal premiere. They have the chance to avoid the worst stereotypes about them. The comedian from Côte-des-Neiges prefers to go after French-speaking Quebecers, towards whom almost all the jokes are directed during the first minutes of the show. On stage, he shamelessly makes fun of their bad French, their so-called withdrawal, their lack of geographical knowledge… In short, everything always comes down to saying that Quebecers are the last of the ignoramuses.
Of course, if you’re not worth a laughing stock, you’re not worth much. Of course, Quebecers have flaws and comedians are right to point them out in broad daylight to make fun of them. Sugar Sammy is just aiming elsewhere when he makes fun of the false benevolence and the eye-catching side of Quebec show-business, from which he seems to have distanced himself, given the sometimes quite scathing jokes on Martin Matte, Mike Ward, Jérémy Demay, Maripier Morin or Marie-Mai.
Still, the redundancy ends up becoming boring all the same. Especially since it has an air of deja-vu. After a long exile, Sugar Sammy prefers to serve reheated to his public, rather than putting himself at risk. The heads of Truc are the same as when the general Quebec public knew it ten years ago: the PQ deputies, whom he compares to the handicapped, the defenders of the French fact, the chroniclers of the empire Quebecor. If we remove racism from Montreal Journalthere are only swimming pool advertisements left, he ironically, to the applause of a public visibly won over to his cause.
That said, even the most ardent nationalists can only recognize in Sugar Sammy an ironclad repartee, a raw talent for stand-up. A real beast of the stage, he likes once again in this new show to interact with members of the public, which at least sometimes allows him to think outside the box.
Calling out the French in France, he scratches their pinched accent, which gives them the air of homosexuals, he jokes. Falling into a register that a Peter MacLeod would not have denied in the mid-90s, the 47-year-old comedian even goes so far as to dare to make a few jokes about trans women, for whom he admits to having no desire, or even on lesbians and vegans, the only ones not to have self-mockery, he judges.
No, Sugar Sammy will not win a prize from the Fondation Émergence or the Fédération des Femmes du Québec with You’re gonna laugh 2. We would probably have dumped Guy Nantel for less than that.