More than a meticulous and enthusiastic observer of the things of life and its superfluities, David Castello-Lopes seeks to understand why the evocation of the past stimulates so many emotions, happy as sad, of smirks that block the way to a few tears streaming down my face. “I have a real fascination with the past, with the passing of time, with remembering and finding archives from a long time ago and comparing them to now. It’s something that I love deeply and that even drives me a little neurotically.”
From there to thinking that things were better before? A second of hesitation then: “Nothing was better before. Afterwards, it depends on which “before” we are talking about. If we go back 100 years, it was horrible. There were 30 times more people who were in extreme poverty. Everything was going less well. Certainly, the atmosphere was a little less polluted by carbon. It’s true that it’s still annoying. But before atmospheric carbon and global warming set us back two centuries, there has to be a lot of it. The world would have to deteriorate enormously for us to want to return to the world of 100 years ago!”
And the future in all this? How does David Castello-Lopes imagine it? We will not hide the fact that he harbors a certain anxiety but that this is fortunately never tinged with fatalism. He hopes to pick up here and there, in the most infinitesimal things, a bit of a joy that becomes rarer after the passing of forty. “I’ve been depressed before in my life and I never stopped laughing. When you’re really not feeling well, laughter isn’t going to solve your problem, it’s not going to take away the urge to throw yourself out of the window. But for a few seconds, you will be in a state of euphoria and you will fall back into the abyss of hell right after. During those 15 seconds, you will have been somewhere else. I find it beautiful that laughter provides that.”
And if the work of the zygomatics does not solve anything, here is his ultimate remedy: “Dark chocolate and iced beer. You saturate your face with a little chocolate and drown it with three or four gulps of ice-cold beer. These are very, very, very strong pleasures. It won’t solve your problems, you might still kill yourself, but you could have counted on it for four seconds.” Comedian, journalist, gourmet: David Castello-Lopes, incredible Swiss army knife (even without being one).
Authentic by David Castello-Lopes, on tour and on June 13, 2025 at the Zénith in Paris. Dates and information available here. The Originsavailable from Denoël editions, €20.
Related News :