Between the A86 and the N1, in a street without shops or pedestrians, next to the canal, a shisha bar popular with all of Saint-Denis (Seine-Saint-Denis) organizes a comedy evening every Wednesday. It is 10 p.m. when my friend Matthias and I push open the door of the Royce Lounge with the desire (a little naughty) to see the prophecy fulfilled: according to many stand-uppers who have gone through the shisha, the exercise is particularly risk. “Impression of playing in front of jacuzzis [en référence aux bruits émis par les clapotis de l’eau des chichas] “ (John Sulo, on Clique TV) or “In front of a City Stade audience” (Magdy M’Bark, “Humorist Galleries” podcast). The worst memory of Ahmed Sparrow: “You play against enemies… You got – 10 laughs. It is one of the rare places where you hear the silence, there are deaths with assaults ” (Click TV). Raised in the culture of the valve, the clientele is uncompromising, “Zero filter”, sums up the comedian Meddy Johnson, met a week earlier at La Fabrique Café, near the Saint-Ouen flea market.
“Hookah bars, nobody wants to play there … It’s too much of a headache”, he insisted then, his gaze half haggard, half melancholy in the direction of the very small scene he had walked a few years earlier, in the roles of “geek” and “The Arab who is not afraid”. “It’s not Le Point Virgule [salle parisienne consacrée aux spectacles d’humour] but it is paid between 100 and 150 euros for a passage of five or ten minutes, much more than in the comedy clubs where you touch, with the hat, between 5 and 20 euros. In a week of shisha, I have already collected 400 euros. But since the customers are drivers, delivery men, people who work late and need a break, often it starts around 11 p.m. and ends around 2 or 3 and it’s in the suburbs. So finally, you spend part of your cash on a snack and another on Uber, in short half of your pay goes there. ”
Matthias and I therefore enter the Royce Lounge, where Meddy Johnson suffered, a few years ago, the delicacies of the most ruthless public he has known: “Oh, you’re setting the charcoal on fire!” Clear. ” After showing the bouncer to the bouncer (correct dress, sanitary pass and reservations), we enter what looks more like a café-theater than the “ghetto shisha” that we had been described: around fifty round tables and armchairs. in half-moon turned towards an Italian curtain, velvet red with golden fringe, which goes up on the sides in drape. We are the first to arrive.
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