Maintenance“I wouldn’t have arrived there if…” Each week, “Le Monde” questions a personality about a decisive moment in their life. The comedian looks back on his encounter, in his college in Trappes, with improvisation. A discipline that he would like to see develop in schools.
Comedian, actor and producer, Jamel Debbouze, born in France to Moroccan parents, has become, since the 1990s, the best known of French stand-up artists and an endearing face in cinema (Asterix and Obelix: Cleopatra mission, Native, On the Marsupilami’s trail, The cow…). Thanks to the Jamel Comedy Club in Paris, he opened the scene to young people from the suburbs and brought out a new generation of comedians. On May 9, Pierre Lescure presented him with the 2022 Citizen Artist Prize awarded by Adami, the civil society for the administration of the rights of artists and performing musicians.
At 46, the “little guy from Trappes”, inveterate tutor, always multiplies the projects. He will launch, on June 15 in Morocco, the tenth edition of the Marrakech humor festival and will be, on June 24, on the stage of the Comédie-Française on the occasion of the Culture & Diversity Improv Trophy. On October 19, we will find him alongside Daniel Auteuil in The New Toy, by James Huth, a new version of the film The toy, by Francis Veber (1976), in which Jamel Debbouze will take over the role of Pierre Richard.
I wouldn’t have come here if…
…if my parents hadn’t supported me and encouraged me body and soul. When I announced to my mother that I was stopping school – oriented in BEP, I didn’t like that at all – she worried about what I wanted to do. As I had started improvisational theater in college, I told him: “I think I would like to try to be an actor. She asked me, “What do you need?” I replied, “Just a lavalier microphone.” At the time, this type of equipment was expensive. She took out a loan to buy it for me. This gesture was a sign of his unwavering support and transmitted to me a strength that allowed me to overcome all obstacles.
And your father, did he agree?
He knew very well that at school I was going wrong. Initially, for him, being an actor was, he said, “for homosexuals and queers”! Then, when I received my first check after a performance, he asked me: “How are the rehearsals going? My father was a pragmatist! I had answered the only question that mattered to him: how do you fill the bowl? He understood that it was a real job and supported me.
How was your life in Trappes, in the Yvelines, before you left school?
I had a happy childhood in Trappes. Full of life and… a lot of bullshit, of course! But never too big not to bother my parents and avoid ending up in Bois-d’Arcy [la maison d’arrêt située à quelques kilomètres de Trappes], like many of my friends. The only time I entered this prison was to give a show. I found plenty of faces that I knew! It was my first audience, they listened to me on Radio Nova and wanted dedications.
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