Saint-Etienne, early 1990s. A 14-year-old teenager, Laurent Regairaz, discovered the joys of drunkenness at Baladin: “It was run by a friend’s parents. Coming from a bourgeois background in Chabrol [NDLR : père chirurgien, mère ophtalmo], I didn’t have the bar culture. It was a revelation. The bistro is a man’s safety barrier before returning home. Zinc is generally a masculine universe, we’re not going to lie. The guy comes out of work with his little suit and his little problems, he takes down his two or three guns, he starts to indulge, he makes dirty jokes, he feels a little better and he goes home… Nothing has changed since Zola or Absinthe by Degas! I love this theater made up of cripples, mythomaniacs and ordinary people, some of whom have a form of nobility. It stuck with me: there isn’t a day when I don’t go to the bar.” Alcohol flowed under the bridges. After briefly being a notary, the bar pillar became famous under the pseudonym of Jason Chicandier To discuss his first book, The Miscellaneous of Chicandier (Flammarion), the comedian did not meet us in a harbor but at Carette, the luxurious tea room located in the 16th arrondissement of Paris. Although it is only snack time, Chicandier orders a Picon beer. Bad pick: no Picon at Carette. A pint will do…
The Pharisees of Saint-Germain-des-Prés will be surprised that we devote two pages to Chicandier, who in the past provided the opening act for Jean-Marie Bigard. Unlike so many false values, it has the merit of not believing itself to have emerged from the thigh of Jupiter. He presents his Miscellaneous… as “a trash book” and defends this genre that is too little practiced by Editions de Minuit: “My title obviously refers to Miscellaneous by Mr. Schott, by Ben Schott, a good shit book. A toilet book is a collection with food and drink, some information here and there, jokes and general culture. We read a page or two, put it down and are happy to pick it up again. My classics: Dummies, the bookBaffie’s books, those of Jean Yanne, The funniest anecdotes from cinema by Bruno Solo. Recently, I happily discovered A bad mind in a bad body by Anne-Sophie Girard. Awesome !”
In the middle of his pint, Chicandier makes this confession to us: “Behind my very hunky side, I am abysmal snobbery. I am a hunk in – sorry for the anglicism, the ordinance of Villers-Cotterêts will not hold it against us! ” Both big and sharp, the wacko who posed in his underwear on the cover of the gastronomic magazine Nobleman has chef Pierre Gagnaire as his godfather: “We sometimes forget that, long before opening addresses around the world, he started in Saint-Etienne. His son Félix was my best childhood friend. Every Wednesday and Saturday , I had lunch in Pierre’s restaurant. At 10 years old, when I decided to be baptized, I asked him to be my godfather. year, he invites me to dinner and we both do our psychoanalysis in his back kitchen. When I’m not feeling well, he’s the one I call. messages of love, we are totally marshmallow…”
“Céline is perhaps the author I find funniest”
This sure taste that Chicandier has when he comes to the table, we find it when it comes to opening a book. He thus makes this very fair judgment on contemporary literature, where testimony prevails over imagination and style: “Everything is victimhood today, in society as in books: I was abused, my father was violent, my mother was toxic, my ex was a narcissistic pervert… As if Jean-Luc Delarue and his show It is discussed had been precursors of the current trend: I suffered, so I’m making a book about it. But no ! Literature is nourished by broader things; it should be lighter, less navel-gazing. We can have traumas and transcend them – what Tolstoy, Dostoyevsky, Proust, Marguerite Yourcenar did…” And good comic literature in all this? Does there still exist one? “I admit that it’s dated… Louis-Ferdinand Céline is perhaps the author I find funniest. journey to the Edge of the Night, I can read every page and cry with laughter. It is permanent second degree. Céline has a sense of description worthy of Proust: when he enters a room, he always spots the detail that will hit the mark. I also revere Frédéric Dard. In his San Antoniothere are punchlines flowery. My goal on stage is to make people laugh, to be colorful, while avoiding unnecessary rudeness as much as possible. I got that from Dard.”
In his Miscellaneous, where Chicandier quotes Molière or Sacha Guitry between two saucy jokes, the four names that come up most often are those of Coluche, Jacques Martin, Jean Yanne and Jacques Dutronc. Our man seems attached to a certain retro cheeky France, the one that the quarterly review is working to rehabilitate Schnock : “That’s totally it! These four were very talented jacks-of-all-trades. I love Dutronc’s aphorisms and elegance. Coluche knew how to play the violin with boxing gloves, and I hold him to the greatest comedian of all time Jean Yanne was an actor and director, but he also composed the music for all his films – he was both a collaborator. Big heads and fine music lover. As for Jacques Martin, he is the music hall personified… And he was a huge cocaine addict, too! The first to have a plaque placed on his nasal septum because the coke crystals had attacked it so much… He died alone, abandoned by everyone, at the Hôtel du Palais in Biarritz. We know the anecdote where Laurent Gerra comes to see him and offers him a glass of wine – and Martin responds that, no thank you, he wants to die in good health…”
How is your health going? Chicandier’s fans can rest assured, he hasn’t stopped drinking: “I don’t like talking about that: I’m a comedian, not an addictologist, a giver of life lessons – these people tire me. Yes, I calmed down after a liver scare. Before, I got up at Ricard. There wasn’t a day when I wasn’t drunk. Now I take care of myself, I have a relationship. appeased with alcohol, of which I enjoy a pleasant consumption.” We saved the best for last. On the last page of his Miscellaneous…Chicandier praises Antoine Blondin, whose praises he sings to us again as he finishes his beer: “Blondin was a pure genius. You just have to look at his manuscripts: he wrote in school notebooks, without a single rature, from the first draft He was above the rest His chronicles on the Tour de France are jewels, masterpieces Blondin, unfortunately, was an alcoholic… Over the years, his intellectual acuity has increased. made less sharp, her notebooks more sloppy. Monsieur Jadis or evening school, he describes with self-deprecation scenes of terrible arguments with his wife in the street. The king of bars was rejected from his kingdom like a common barefoot person. He arrived drunk, he insulted everyone, his verve had disappeared…” That of Chicandier is intact. With this fanatic from our region, we have a Cyrano de Bergerac who, instead of writing love letters, would sign the best toilet book this summer.
The Miscellaneous of Chicandier. By Jason Chicandier. Flammarion, 240 p., €19.
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