Comedian and comedian Guy Bedos is dead

Comedian and comedian Guy Bedos is dead

He will be, according to his wish, buried in the Lumio cemetery in Corsica, the island he loved so much. He nicknamed it "my spare Algeria" because of the "scents of the maquis" that reminded him of his childhood. Guy Bedos died on Thursday 28 May at the age of 85, his son, Nicolas, announced. The actor, comedian and author defined himself as "a resilient cigar". His entire career as a committed artist, a leftist anarchist, an angry pamphleteer, an endless rebel, he draws his roots from his Algerian childhood between a racist and anti-Semitic stepfather and a poetic mother: "The first government I had to endure was my mother and stepfather. My constancy in rebellion comes from there.

On December 23, 2013 at the Olympia, Guy Bedos had ended his 40-year career alone on the stage that had made him famous. In front of a packed house, he handed over his "der des der", named after his show, and confessed: "I'm having a hard time letting go; I just feel comfortable on stage. By the age of 80, he had lost none of his frankness, which had earned him as many friends as he had made enemies. He completely assumed: "What does one mean, I lack nuance? Absolutely, I lack nuance. There's a phrase from the old Sacha Guitry reagent that I'm happy to form my own: "Since I realized which individuals I exasperated, I admit I've done my best to exasperate them."

True to his trademark, Guy Bedos pulled out his Bristol cards for a final press review for his latest performance. Playing on stage, he resolved the scores with "los fachos", confided his fear of the National Front's rise, paid tribute to Mandela, praised the "courage" of his "friend" Christiane Taubira. He wondered what Manuel Valls was doing on the left and admitted, mockingly, about François Hollande: "I cannot consider it", but added: "I do not regret my vote because, as Françoise Giroud said: 'In politics, you have to solve two disadvantages'." That was one of his favourite phrases.

The "successful old clown"

With a white handkerchief in his hand, Guy Bedos said goodbye to his faithful audience, reminding them, as usual, that "life is an Italian comedy: you laugh, cry, live, die (...) It's our role to be funny, artists. The "successful old clown" received a standing ovation. A touch later inside the dressing room, several generations of artists came to greet him, including Jean Dujardin, Jean-Pierre Marielle, Charles Aznavour, Matthieu Chedid, Claude Rich Jacques Higelin, Michel Boujenah.

It ended with the one-man show and political satire, but not the stage. A couple of months later, he returned to the stage at the Théâtre Hébertot in Paris, in Samuel Benchetrit's Minus 2. In her pyjamas, in a single bed, she left, together with Philippe Magnan, during a last sentimental escape to provoke death before the cancer took them away.

Because, if the only one on stage was the good story of his life as an artist and allowed him to be part, for many years, of the best French comedians (together with Pierre Desproges and Coluche), he appeared once and with talent. He has also been a part of the French film industry, both in the theatre (notably in 1993 in Arturo Ui's The Rise of Résistible, directed by Jérôme Savary) and in the cinema (in 2012, he loved to play an old militant in Stéphane Robelin's Et si on vivait tous).

Between two solo exhibitions, Guy Bedos regularly escaped on the set

Becoming a comedian has always been the dream of an abused teenager who aspired to "take refuge in fiction to endure the unbearable in reality". Then, between two solo shows, Guy Bedos regularly escaped on stage (especially in two plays written by his son Nicolas) or on set. His character Simon, a doctor stifled by his very possessive black-foot Jewish mother, in An Elephant Who Deceives Greatly and We Will All Go to Paradise, by Yves Robert, gives him great recognition.

But it's not the big screen that will make him famous. "I don't have the slightest bitterness towards a cinema that would have neglected me, only regret and also lucidity", he admitted...

Family violence

Guy Bedos was born on June 15, 1934 in Algiers. Since his first sixteen years in Algeria, which he left in 1949, he has a painful memory of emotional misery. He was 5 years old when his parents separated: "One day I never saw my father again, it was another man who slept with my mother. Sent to a rural boarding house for two years, he lived there the" favourite passage "of his childhood thanks to Finouche, the daughter of the farm. This teacher, "my real mother", wrote in Mémoire Outre-Mère (Stock) in 2005, teaches him to read, write, count, but also to "think: freedom, equality, fraternity, human rights beyond the divisions that divided Algeria".

Back in his family, he finds family violence, between a stepfather who makes him understand that he is too much and a nimble mother who spoils his childhood. She often wants to escape from this environment and even die. "I was only cured of this mental cancer, this suicidal inclination when my children were born," she says in the beautiful documentary Guy Bedos, a Laugh of Resistance, directed by Dominique Gros in 2009.

"I did theatre with a doctor's prescription"

After arriving in France with his mother and his two twin stepsisters, a few months old, he decides to quickly leave the inhospitable family home in Rueil-Malmaison (Hauts-de-Seine) to avoid "falling into a mummification of deadly boredom". . "He dreams of the theater and enrolls in the Rue Blanche school." I did theater with a doctor's prescription," he liked to say. My luck was that an attentive doctor understood that I was distressed. Deeply depressed, he advised my mother to let me follow an artistic vocation, otherwise it would end badly," he explained to Le Monde in 2009.

Rue Blanche, he meets Jean-Paul Belmondo, Jean-Pierre Marielle, Michel Aumont, he stages and plays the leading role of Harlequin educated by love, Marivaux, and "cures" his torments. Chance will take him to the music hall. Jacques Chazot wrote his first sketch for him, which he performed at the Fountain of the Four Seasons, directed by Pierre Prévert, Jacques' brother. It was Jacques Prévert, but also Boris Vian and François Billetdoux who encouraged him to scribble in his notebooks. He began to perform in cabarets, alone or with Jean-Pierre Marielle. In the 1960s, he found himself, in a co-star, with Barbara in Bobino, then on tour with Jacques Brel. Humor becomes his favorite field.

For ten years, with actress Sophie Daumier (who died on January 1, 2004), Guy Bedos rhymes with humor and love. A couple in town, this comic duo, who met on the set of Jacques Baratier's film Dragees with Pepper, perform many sketches written in particular by Jean-Loup Dabadie. Some of them (the racist from Vacances à Marrakech, the hard-handed drummer from La Drague, the sexual wretch from Tous des salopes) were a great popular success. In 1974, the duo split up, and in this year, when Giscard "the aristo" moved into the Elysée Palace, Guy Bedos became "me" and became a political polemicist in shows where he put on news breaks.

"Make fun with sad"

With him, the spoken press review becomes an exercise in style. Addicted to news, he devours reading newspapers. “I read them like an ordinary citizen, and then I find out how to make fun of it. His tropisms are constant: the pope and more broadly all religions, presidents, important ministers, the facts of society. A man of impulses, as soon as something revolts him, he becomes disillusioned on stage, relieves himself by the laughter of human stupidity. His motto: "Make fun with sad. "Giscard at the Elysée, that annoys me. Strongly. I say it and I write it, "he admits.

This stand-up before the hour delivers anger to the public and gives it to heart, updating its press review night after night. Applauded by the left, disparaged by the right, the pamphleteer fills the rooms and is prohibited on certain television and radio programs. Alongside Gisèle Halimi (secular godmother of her son Nicolas) and Simone Signoret, he is always quick to petition or demonstrate to defend human rights, support the association Droit au logement.

 The humorist, with the president of the association Droit au logement, Jean-Baptiste Eyraud, during a demonstration on September 4, 2015, in Paris. FLORIAN DAVID / AFP

So on May 10, 1981, the Antisciscardian exulted in the election of François Mitterrand.

 This evening in Bobino is party time. But like others, Guy Bedos is disillusioned. In 1989, at the Théâtre du Gymnase, he said: "It becomes difficult to be on the left. Especially when you're not on the right. Hair scratching from power, it embraces the right, and is not tender with the left as soon as it departs from its ideals and values. Nevertheless, he will keep friendly ties with François Mitterrand, who did not miss any of his shows. No matter what the President said to him, "You are going strong, nevertheless!" ", He regularly invited the troublemaker to lunch or dinner at the Elysee Palace and even invited him once, in August 1993, to Latche [in the Landes, where the former president owned a house].

Political-satirical speaker

In his career as a politico-satirical speaker, some of his invectives will sometimes bring him to trial. Whether Marine Le Pen or Nadine Morano, both lost to this committed humorist who loudly claimed a "laugh of resistance". Antiracism was the major commitment of his life. In his Algerian childhood, he had heard his Catholic mother say: "The Jews and the Arabs, that they kill each other, it will always do that less. "This sentence marked him forever. "My Torah, my Koran, my Bible, it is the Universal Declaration of Human Rights," wrote this convert to atheism in I will remember everything (Fayard, 2015). "My career as a comedian is a success, my life as a utopian citizen, a failure," he noted in the face of the rise of the far right.

Guy Bedos was a "melancholy", who did not hide his tears

Like an eternal teenager, angry and curious, he never hesitated to say: "I was pissed too much in my youth for me to get bored in my old age. "He inspired several comedians, including Christophe Alévêque and Stéphane Guillon, who make their honey from political news. He loved Pierre Desproges, Fellag and Muriel Robin, with whom he performed a duet in 1992.

Guy Bedos was a "melancholy" who did not hide his tears. Without blush, he said how he would never get used to the disappearance of those he loved (Sophie Daumier, Pierre Desproges, Simone Signoret, James Baldwin ...). He left to join them. A member of the Association for the Right to Die with Dignity, he warned that this ultimate freedom would not be taken away from him: "In an emergency, I will choose assisted suicide. With or without the permission of the President of the Republic. "