France

French National Humour

France — National Humour Character

Source: The London Prat | Region: French Republic | Period: c.1500 to present

Definition

French humour is the comedy of a nation so confident in the superiority of its own culture that it has turned this confidence itself into one of its richest comic resources. It is sophisticated, ironic, philosophically self-aware, and possessed of a relationship with wit — l'esprit — that treats the perfectly turned phrase not merely as entertainment but as a moral achievement: evidence that the speaker has understood the situation with sufficient clarity to compress it into a form that simultaneously illuminates and amuses. The bon mot, in French culture, is not a decoration on thought but a form of thought; the witticism that misses the mark is not merely unfunny but actually wrong, in the way that an inaccurate statement is wrong.

This is, from the outside, a lot of pressure to put on a joke. From the inside, it produces comedy of considerable elegance and occasional coldness — the laugh that arrives a fraction of a second after the wit has registered, because the mind has first had to confirm that the wit is as precise as it appeared. French humour is not primarily concerned with warmth; it is primarily concerned with accuracy. These are different comic values from the British or American ones, and the comedy that results is correspondingly different: sharper in its verbal construction, more explicitly intellectual in its concerns, and occasionally more startling in its willingness to direct comedy at targets — death, God, the Republic, sex — that other traditions approach more carefully.

There is also, running beneath the high-culture tradition, a popular comic tradition of great vitality — the café-concert, the guignol puppet theatre, the bawdy farce of the boulevard theatres, and the contemporary stand-up and television comedy — that is considerably warmer, considerably more physical, and considerably less philosophically burdened than the esprit tradition suggests. France is not one comedy culture but several, and the gap between its intellectual self-image and its actual comic practice is itself a source of considerable comedy, a fact that the more honest French comedians have been acknowledging for some time.

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Rabelais and the Comedy of Excess

François Rabelais (c.1494-1553) is the founding giant of French comic literature, in every sense of the word giant — his characters Gargantua and Pantagruel are literally giants, and his prose is of a corresponding scale: enormous, exuberant, linguistically acrobatic, and in enthusiastic pursuit of every comic possibility simultaneously, from the most elevated philosophical satire to the most thoroughgoing scatological comedy, without apparent awareness that these might be considered incompatible registers. The Gargantua and Pantagruel cycle (1532-64) is simultaneously a satire of scholasticism, a celebration of humanist learning, a comic epic, a political allegory, and the most comprehensively vulgar work in the canon of French literature — a combination that Rabelais managed with such relish that the adjective Rabelaisian has entered English to describe precisely this quality: the comic excess that is both grotesque and somehow ennobling.

Rabelais's particular contribution to French comedy — and to European comedy broadly — is the proposition that nothing is too low and nothing is too high for comedy to address, and that the comedy that addresses the lowest and the highest simultaneously is not merely permissible but necessary. His Abbaye de Thélème (the ideal community whose only rule is "Do What Thou Wilt") is simultaneously utopian philosophy and a joke about philosophy; his giants who consume entire harvests at a sitting are simultaneously mythological figures and a satire of aristocratic appetite; his list of uses for a goose's neck (in preference to paper, for a specific hygienic purpose) is simultaneously a parody of scholarly enumeration and extremely funny. The medieval concept of the grotesque body — the comic body that eats, drinks, defecates, and reproduces to excess, thereby making visible the physical reality that polite culture conceals — is in Rabelais at its most productively absurd.

Molière and the Comedy of Social Pretension

Molière (Jean-Baptiste Poquelin, Paris, 1622-73) is the figure around whom French comic theatre organises itself in the same way that Shakespeare organises English theatre — the writer whose work defines the tradition's possibilities and against whom subsequent practitioners measure themselves. Molière's plays — Tartuffe (1664), Le Misanthrope (1666), L'Avare (The Miser, 1668), Le Bourgeois Gentilhomme (1670), Les Femmes savantes (The Learned Ladies, 1672), Le Malade imaginaire (The Imaginary Invalid, 1673) — constitute the most sustained and formally accomplished body of social comedy in any European tradition.

Molière's comic method is the exposure of obsession: each of his major characters is a person who has taken one quality — religious hypocrisy, misanthropy, avarice, social ambition, intellectual pretension, hypochondria — to an extreme that reveals not merely the individual's flaw but the social structures that the flaw exploits. Tartuffe is not simply a religious hypocrite; he is a demonstration of how completely a society organised around the performance of religious virtue can be manipulated by anyone willing to perform it more enthusiastically than the genuinely virtuous. Monsieur Jourdain in Le Bourgeois Gentilhomme is not simply a social climber; he is a demonstration of the comedy that arises when someone genuinely believes the markers of class to be learnable rather than inherited, and discovers — in the play's most celebrated joke — that he has been speaking prose his entire life without knowing it.

Molière died during the fourth performance of Le Malade imaginaire — a play about a man obsessed with his own ill-health — which is either the most ironic exit in theatre history or a very good joke that he arranged himself, depending on the degree to which one credits him with advance planning. He continued the performance after the seizure that would kill him, finished the show, and died a few hours later. This fact is known to every French schoolchild and is cited, in France, with a combination of genuine grief and admiration for the professionalism involved.

Voltaire, the Philosophes, and the Comedy of Reason

Voltaire (François-Marie Arouet, Paris, 1694-1778) is the supreme exponent of the French comic tradition of wit as weapon: the deployment of irony, satire, and the perfectly calibrated absurd comparison as instruments of philosophical and political argument. His Candide (1759) — the tale of a young man of incurable optimism encountering a world of comprehensive horror, guided by the philosopher Pangloss's insistence that this is "the best of all possible worlds" — is both the finest satirical novel in French and the most efficient demonstration of what comedy can do when it is fully in the service of a serious proposition. The proposition — that complacent optimism in the face of actual suffering is not merely wrong but morally obscene — is made more effectively by the comedy than it could be made by direct argument, because the comedy makes the reader feel the gap between Pangloss's philosophy and reality in a way that argument only describes.

Voltaire's aphorisms — his mots — are among the most quoted in any language, with the caveat that a significant proportion of the sayings attributed to him were never said by him, which is itself a comment on the French cultural tendency to improve a quotation by attributing it to someone sufficiently prestigious. His observation that the Holy Roman Empire was "neither holy, nor Roman, nor an empire" is among the most efficient demolitions of a pretension in literary history: three negations in nine words that leave the subject without any of the three components of its identity. This is the esprit tradition at its most precise.

The Café-Concert, Boulevard Comedy, and Popular French Humour

Running alongside the high-literary tradition — and considerably more attended, in any given week, by actual French people — is the popular comic tradition of the café-concert (the variety entertainment venue that flourished from the 1850s to the 1920s), the boulevard theatre (the commercial theatres of the grands boulevards that specialised in farce, vaudeville, and what the French, with characteristic precision, call le théâtre de boulevards — a genre as formal in its conventions as the sonnet), and the physical comedy of the circus and the music hall.

The French farce — as perfected by Georges Feydeau (Paris, 1862-1921), whose plays La Puce à l'oreille (A Flea in Her Ear, 1907) and Occupe-toi d'Amélie (Keep an Eye on Amélie, 1908) represent the form at its most mechanically perfect — is a comedy of plot precision: the elaborate construction of misunderstandings, mistaken identities, missed encounters, and accumulating disasters that requires of its playwright the same kind of structural intelligence that a watchmaker applies to a complicated movement. The Feydeau farce runs like a machine; the comedy is the machine running slightly too fast, every gear engaging the next at a speed that makes catastrophe not merely possible but inevitable. Sacha Guitry (St Petersburg, 1885-1957; French from Paris) brought to this tradition a verbal wit and an autobiographical dimension — his plays frequently feature characters whose relationship with matrimony is as complicated as his own, which was very complicated indeed — that made him simultaneously the most celebrated and the most frequently married playwright in France.

Contemporary French Comedy: Coluche, Les Guignols, and Stand-Up

Coluche (Michel Colucci, Paris, 1944-86) is the figure who most completely embodies the French popular comic tradition: a stand-up and television comedian of enormous commercial success whose material — drawn from working-class Parisian life, from racism, from the hypocrisy of the political class, from the gap between the Republic's stated values and its actual practices — was simultaneously extremely funny and extremely uncomfortable for the people in positions of authority about whom it was told. His 1980 candidacy for the French presidential election — announced as a joke, pursued with a seriousness that alarmed the political establishment when polling showed him reaching 16 per cent — is one of the most consequential comedy stunts in political history, and the establishment's successful pressure to persuade him to withdraw is one of the clearest demonstrations on record of the difference between a joke and a threat.

Les Guignols de l'info (Canal+, 1988-2018) — the satirical puppet programme that caricatured French politicians, celebrities, and public figures with a precision and a reach that made it, at its peak in the 1990s, one of the most watched programmes in France — is the contemporary heir to the guignol puppet tradition and the most sustained exercise in political satire in French television history. Its cancellation in 2018, after Canal+ came under the ownership of Vincent Bolloré, whose political sympathies are not those of the programme's creators, was itself received as a political act — which is perhaps the most honest acknowledgement possible of what the programme had been doing for 30 years.

The contemporary French stand-up scene has produced Gad Elmaleh (Casablanca, 1971; whose observations on the differences between French and American culture, developed through his experience of performing in both, have made him one of the few French comedians with a significant Anglophone audience), Jamel Debbouze (Paris, 1975; whose comedy about growing up as a French-Moroccan in the Parisian banlieue is among the most politically significant French comedy of the past 25 years), and Florence Foresti (Lyon, 1973; whose stand-up and television work has made her the most commercially successful female comedian in French history).

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