Interview with Dany Boon, alone on stage in Geneva in March

Among the stars of French cinema, we ask for the clown. A “zouave”, an “andouille”, said his teachers. As a teenager, his school reports lectured him in black and white: “Clown is not a profession!” Nearly half a century has passed, it makes a perfect title for a show that makes you laugh. Here is Dany Boon, 58 years old, bombarded as chief clown on the occasion of his solo return to the stage, seven years after “Dany de Boon des Hauts-De-France”. Directed by the unalterable Isabelle Nanty. From January on the road, visit to the Geneva Arena on 11 mars.

Dring. Hello Dany. Do you like clowns? Since when? Can it be learned? Above all: is clowning a difficult job? He took his soft little voice, his speech imbued with ch’tinever thunderous, always lively. The highest paid actor in the north of France may protect his millions, but the child of a proletarian remains a lovable boy. And this is certainly what still earns him the support of a large audience. An example of his own style? We ask Dany Boon if he remembers his best Christmas present. His response: “As a child, I won a cosmonaut costume in a Prisunic raffle in which I almost suffocated. Today, I’m claustrophobic.”

Laughter and the absurd

“I always had the certainty that my life was on stage, that I had to make people laugh.” He comes from a “modest” family as he says, father a truck driver, mother a housekeeper. Ahmed was born in Kabylia. Danièle grew up in Armentières. Their son Daniel Farid Hamidou would like to change the world, sometimes. “One day, I wrote a letter for the Théâtre de Lille, which I never dared to send. I imagined myself climbing the ranks of the theater, starting with being a sweeper.”

We aim for the student’s notebook. Not shiny. On the desk, we spot a book. Dany Boon eager for literature? See… “In the French books, there were two sketches by Raymond Devos. It was precisely by reading them that I realized that we could laugh and do the absurd. And that we can remain kind, without falling into vulgarity. The absurd is great, it’s timeless, you can always laugh about it.”

Raymond Devos. If there is a “clown” who greatly inspired Dany Boon, it is him, this paragon of nonsense and derision disappeared in 2006. “Since I have been asked to make a speech, I will let you know right away that I am going to speak without saying anything…”. “I was very close to him,” testifies Dany Boon. One day when he was to play at Morges-sous-Rire, Raymond, who was ill, asked me to replace him. During the evening, I still asked him to come on stage. He did forty minutes of show!”

Back to school. On the poster for his new solo act, Dany Boon is not yet Dany Boon, but this smiling young boy dreaming of a career on stage. “Clown is not a profession” was almost called “Can do better”. Another one of those killer little sentences that pins a schoolboy on you like an insect in a box. “I find this perverse. This is not addressed to you, but to the parents. You bring your notebook back as you go to the scaffold. As if a boss asked you to bring a note to your wife.”

“You’re going to end up on the street!”

From Armentières, Dany Boon left “very quickly”. He was 14 years old and had just successfully passed the entrance exam for the Saint-Luc art school in Tournai, in neighboring Belgium. “I found my life in drawing. And humor. By clowning around, you could say. “My parents were worried. They warned me: you don’t realize, you’re going to end up on the street! My art teachers told me: do what you love, make sure you’re happy, even if the audience remains intimate.”

He was 16, wrote his first show, signed his first contract. It will be a life on the street, in fact, doing mime, playing the guitar. “I played in shopping malls, I was the automated guide.” Above all, Dany Boon, already loved stories, and ate up everything: “At the theater tonight”, Pierre Sabbagh’s TV show, cinema too, American comedy preferably, Billy Wilder, Frank Capra, the actor British director Peter Sellers, director Jacques Tati on the French side. The absurd, always.

Be a clown, then! “Yes, I like that, I like to make people laugh with the body, with musical instruments. And then, it’s a passion. It’s a lot of work, without the impression of work… With Isabelle Nanty, we worked all summer in a theater near Paris, we will work again in January before the premiere.”

Dany Boon will still talk to us about the “instinct” that drives him on stage, the childhood emotions that are still very present. “Those emotions,” he said, “felt when I made my mother laugh if she wasn’t feeling well…”. Doing repairs with humor, he likes the idea. “There is tremendous happiness when you make people laugh in real life, in front of people. I’ve always had that. For the rest, I have a normal life, I do my shopping, I take the children to the cinema. And if I travel with a low-cost airline, the only difference is that I take photos with the whole plane.”

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