Stain Review | Simon Delisle says thank you to his shitty life

With attachedSimon Delisle presents a second show which will leave its mark.

The recipe for happiness, according to Simon Delisle? You have to know how to accept that life is on tuesday. With his vitiligo which, in his own words, makes him look like a Jackson Pollock painting, as well as because of the rare disease with which he shares his daily life (polyendocrinopathy), the almost forty-year-old has every reason to refuse to repeat a ready-made phrase like “Thank you life”.

A sentence that drives him crazy, because life is too full of inconveniences, pains and disappointments for us to thank it with so little nuance.

Presented Tuesday evening at the Fifth Room of Place des Arts in front of a crowd made up of several of his colleagues clearly happy to be there for him, attached is the perfect example of a second show in which a comedian builds on the strengths of his first tour, while exploring new tones, which sometimes surprise, but without ever swearing.

First known for his work as an author, Simon Delisle can count on a sense of the formula that creates an image, which remains his main quality. He also knows full well that before tackling tougher subjects, it is better to relax his audience.

It is in this perspective that he begins the evening with some anecdotes as improbable as they are humiliating, inspired by his worst shows in his career, an effective way of reminding us that a comedian, despite the power that gives him the microphone, is not never above a slap in the face of life.

Then, evoking his distaste for winter activities, he quietly slides towards the real theme of his show, that of the renunciations that his countless injuries forced him to make, and because of which, one day he had to admit it , he had become one of those men “all the time tabarnac ».

In one of the most delirious passages of attachedSimon Delisle tells how listening to the audio book The cloud shovelera work for young people in which the author Simon Boulerice describes vitiligo with a touching dose of dreaminess, brought it out of its hinges. It was high time for him to see a psychologist.

“I felt like physically hurting Simon Boulerice,” he said, while in the room, sitting in front of us, the real Simon Boulerice was trying to catch his breath, he was laughing so hard.

The king of resilience

Simon Delisle has often been told that he is a model of resilience, a compliment which ended up annoying him, because anyone who has become a specialist in the art of getting up must have fallen frequently. Nothing to make your chest puff out with pride.

The comedian will also have had to become a master of self-deprecation, an ability that many take as an invitation to make jokes at the expense of others’ differences. An opportunity for Delisle to deconstruct certain preconceived ideas about these misfortunes which do not kill us and which, as Kanye West rapped, paraphrasing Nietzsche, allegedly make us stronger.

Let him scratch the coaches of life and influencers, take a detour to the Dixie Lee restaurant in Baie-Comeau or discuss the anatomy of cockroaches, Simon Delisle never abandons his common thread. Each of these lighter parentheses acts rather like so many calls for air, of explosive comic power, at the heart of a personal story, which could otherwise become too dark.

Given his health, Simon Delisle has experienced several losses: that of meeting certain beauty standards, that of eating candy, that of smoking pot. That, above all, of a certain carefreeness, of a peace of mind, of being able to go unnoticed.

He is therefore no different from the leader who was on his t-shirt Tuesday evening, Anthony Bourdain, whose cynicism has never been anything other than the symptom of a disappointment with the human race and, until a certain point, faced with this existence which always ends up taking back everything that he taught us to love.

Even if attached resembles the negative of an ode to life, it is ironically difficult to receive it otherwise. Each of the bursts of laughter provoked by Simon Delisle is displayed as proof that without a test, laughter would lose one of its main reasons for being, and that without laughter, life would undoubtedly not be worth living. This show has everything it takes to make a splash.

Visit the artist’s website

attached

On tour throughout Quebec

8/10