Look for something real, not something funny. It is by making this sentence his motto that Jay Du Temple is currently building his second show, in a sometimes radically intimate tone, which he will premiere for 11 evenings at Zoofest.
Posted at 7:00 a.m.
Saturday July 2. Under the spotlights of the MainLine Theater, a hall of a hundred seats on Saint-Laurent Boulevard in Montreal, Jay Du Temple is dressed in black from head to toe and sports an Anthony Kiedis mustache. At the microphone, the comedian is however much more composed than the simian singer of the Red Hot Chili Peppers.
“I’ve always been dressed quite lightly on stage, because I moved around a lot,” explains the 30-year-old artist, whom he met in a downtown café a few days later.
When I started playing again at the beginning of the year, I wore a hoodie all the time, and the goal was not to have to take it off, not to get hot. My goal was to speak the same on stage as in life, to be relaxed.
Jay Du Temple
Look for something real, not something funny, a friend, actor Guillaume Girard, told him one day. “And I didn’t get that out of my head,” says the man who has been presenting his second show, still without a title, for only a few weeks.
Jay Du Temple speaks less, of course, of the stupidly factual truth of the anecdote that happened for real than of the truth of the heart and stomach. “It made sense that the conversations I have in life, with my friends, I bring them on stage, that I write from what lives in me the most. »
Avoid mustard
What lives in Jay Du Temple? In this new hour of material, which marks his return to the boards since the end of his tour do well at the Bell Center in January 2020, the young man examines from all angles the pitfalls that his most recent romantic relationships have encountered, to come to the conclusion that the problem is largely due to his chronic fear of displeasing.
Without detour or evasion, the comedian digs deep into himself and deals less, in the end, with male-female relationships than with this long and eternal process which consists in making peace with love, but also in making peace. with oneself, with the heritage of one’s parents as well as with one’s first wounds.
Nested proposal? No way. But, it is clear, the host ofDouble occupation would have written another type of show, much less ambitious, if he had simply sought to reflect his TV popularity on his ticket sales, everywhere in the province. He thus very finely marries this tendency, crossing the medium of Anglo-Saxon humor, to find his raw material in the intimate.
PHOTO SARAH MONGEAU-BIRKETT, THE PRESS
Jay Du Temple, at the MainLine Theater
Testing the raw versions of this long story even caused a few moments of unease in different evenings of humor, while the author was still trying to calibrate his tone. “There are people in Verdun who know way too much about me,” he says, exaggerating a little, this second lap containing nothing that could make the gossip of the web wriggle.
In addition to a few good-natured nods to his affection for nail polish and to the doubts that his heterosexuality sometimes arouses, it is to the son of Nicole and Yvan, and not to the public figure, that this show allows us to to have access, but with the happy consequences that a zoom in so pronounced becomes a portal to a form of universality.
“I may be judging myself, but I’ve long felt like the people I look up to wouldn’t like my material. And there, I found myself taking a step in their direction,” he says, taking great care to specify, for fear of appearing pretentious (one of his obsessions), that he does not compare himself to them.
The comedians who inspire Jay? He evokes Jerrod Carmichael, whose most recent filmed spectacle, the powerful Rothaniel, is delivered in a seated position, in a tone worthy of a candlelight confidence. Garry Shandling, late legend of American laughter, whom Quebecers discovered thanks to Judd Apatow’s documentary, and for whom humor was a kind of spiritual quest. Mike Birbiglia, who combines the poetry of a podcast like This American Life to a mastery of the stage testifying to many years of improvisation.
Humor, underlines Jay Du Temple, is one of the rare forms of art, if not the only one, where the public is involved in the birth of a work, where the creators submit their fragments of monologues piece by piece to the reality test. An essential process, but not always good advice, he observes.
“I don’t want to be the one to say if the audience isn’t laughing, that’s okay, but it’s easy to go off on the opposite tangent by putting too much mustard where the laughs are. The reflex in the work is to add jokes, but I always try to come back to what I’m saying. Mike Birbiglia can end an explosive bit on an unfunny sentence, which marks a time in history, and as a spectator, I am not bored. On the contrary, it makes me become even more attached. »
Assumed artist
Jay Du Temple clearly follows the path of Louis-José Houde, who allows himself extracurricular activities (cinema, television), but for whom the stage space is the inviolable space of the absence of compromise.
“I need to push myself creatively, and stand-up is where that happens. But when people ask me: do you do this show in reaction to OD ? the answer is no. We are all multiple”, pleads the one who until very recently had difficulty embracing the word artist.
Before, it’s as if I didn’t feel up to it. It’s not long since I assumed the fact that what I love most is having a good idea. At some point, I realized that I was so scared for nothing of looking swollen-headed.
Jay Du Temple
“I don’t want to diminish the work I do at OD, but it’s very comfortable, he continues. There is a team around me who dresses me, they write me lines. It’s a lot of fun, but it’s very comfortable. »
And comfort, Jay thinks, is the enemy of fun, which usually springs up in the wake of adversity, big or small, mundane or existential. He remembers the joy that had invaded his friend Guillaume, at a curious moment.
“When I bought my house, I had a lot of renovations to do and there were a lot of things that weren’t working. I was a little shocked, and Guillaume was so happy. He said to me: “It’s good that it happens to you, you’ll stay funny.” »
“Just be Garry. Garry Shandling punctuated his lush notebooks with these three words, reminding him that there was no fulfillment possible except in the assumption of one’s full identity. This is the beautiful and gigantic task that Jay Du Temple is tackling. “It helps me a lot to repeat that to myself, to tell myself that I can just be myself. »
July 14, 16, 17, 18, 19, 20, 22, 24, 25, 26 and 28 at the Balustrade of the Monument-National.