Actually, I don’t know anything about this Polaroid, but I know it’s always been hanging out in my parents’ room. The photo was taken in Lamarche-sur-Saône, where my grandparents lived. I don’t know when it dates from. In any case, I’m very small on it. I’m all cute. At the same time, it intrigues me, this image, because I look really hostile. I almost attack the device. My weapon of choice is a guitar, which isn’t the best of ideas. I don’t know where this instrument comes from, by the way, because I suck at music. It shows: you can’t say that I hold the instrument very well.
The music was no, but the show came not long after that time. In my family, people sang, laughed a lot, and I loved when, suddenly, everything turned into a show. I liked it even better when I was in charge of the animation. At school, I did theatre. I am very proud to have played the main role in a play, a real play with a real director who had come to make us work. I was a little chimney sweep. I also made the beaver. I would come on stage doing rolls – I must have thought that was how beavers moved. I remember that I whispered the text to all the other actors, I knew it by heart, it seemed natural to me.
I didn’t know that humor was a profession, but I already loved making people laugh. I had noticed that my family laughed when I had an accident, when I fell on the ground. So I was doing it on purpose, I was collapsing. It worked every time, they laughed. It is perhaps there, recovering from my pranks, that I understood the role of humor, the fact that we feel good when we make people laugh.
Anyway, my parents, whom I had included in my first show, where they appeared in a video, were very funny. My father has a wit, he can be tongue-in-cheek. My mother does not have a filter. She says what she thinks and that always creates incongruous situations. I remember that, when I had done the Olympia, she was in my dressing room after the show and Hervé Vilard was there. She hadn’t recognized him, although she loves French songs, and asked very loudly who “was this old man who looks like Hervé Vilard”. There was something wacky, quirky, and I owe a lot to that spirit.
