Pierre Desproges

Pierre Desproges was, alongside Coluche and Thierry Le Luron, one of France's favorite humorists in the 1980s. Gifted with a sharp sense of humor, an incredible capacity for prose, and a good culture, he started his career in the press, becoming a journalist for L'Aurore, where his increasingly acidic posts almost got him fired. Soon, with friends Daniel Prévost and Jacques Martin in the influential and provocative Sunday TV show Le Petit Rapporteur, he made TV history with some memorable footage. Yet again, Desproges' jokes earned him more and more censorship, so he decided to go back to L'Aurore and started writing texts for radio airings in Thierry Le Luron's weekly Des Prasites sur l'Antenne in 1978 and 1979, and later on for his character in Le Tribunal des Flagrants Délires from 1980 to 1983, in which he portrayed a new guest in each show. In the early '80s, he also wrote a series of ironic portraits of foreigners in Charlie Hebdo, later compiled under the title "Les Etrangers Sont Nuls" ("Foreigners suck"); a title he only could assume, his second degree never having been questioned at the time (it was later on, in the even more cynical 2000s). By the time he had released his 1985 novel Des Femmes Qui Tombent, he was back on TV with one of the all-time most absurd daily TV shows, La Minute Nécessaire de Monsieur Cyclopède, comprised of a hundred aired episodes covering a two-year span, which, according to his own saying: "divided France between the morons who liked [it] and the morons who didn't". It was in 1986 that he wrote his infamous Chroniques de la Haine Ordinaire ("Chronicles of Common Hatred"), and he hit the stage twice in 1984 and 1986, both of performances being documented as books, videos and CDs. Those two shows were instant classics, though his texts were some of his darkest and most provocative, with jokes about Shoah, God, politics, people he hated (everyone, supposedly), cancer, and death. His own death. Because if there is something Pierre Desproges made clear, it was that laughing about everything was possible. Ultimately, in 1988, he was taken by that same cancer he had had the incredible nerve to joke about, leaving an incalculable legacy for generations to follow. As a matter of fact, the demand for Desproges videos on the 2000s video websites was so strong that arrangements were made between his heirs and the Daily Motion to create his own video channel.