The "Late Show", this cream pie expression which in reality means almost nothing to anyone in France, apart from those infused with American channels and trendy animators.
You know what ?
We don't care, we've never seen the famous David Lettermans or the likes of Jimmy Fallon, and capturing their machine-gun speed jokes in their original version is not within our linguistic means, provided that these channels are accessible.
If we sat Monday evening in front of Alain Chabat's "Le Late Show", it was because it was him, because it was a gently sloping end of the evening on TF1, after "USA-Pays de Galles" and Denis Brogniart's World Cup magazine, and also because a magazine that starts at 11 p.m. and ends a little before midnight, it's reasonable, at the antipodes of "late shows", this French fashion of making the on air at 2 a.m. after pretending to grill guests who wouldn't fit together in an elevator.
The Late Show is about doing more humor with far fewer people.
No other complicity than self-mockery
Conclusion: after five minutes, three giggles already.
Chabat arrives on set in a particularly classy costume - the Late Show is the spirit of cool, you have to dress up - and marks its entrance with a tunnel of fake ads that invert the spirit of "Enjoy your program with…”.
In the end, the pee-caca humor that made all the charm of “The City of Fear” and Dummies infiltrates the latest advertisements for a PQ ad in case you “shit yourself laughing”.
To be seen in context, of course.
Like Sandrine Kiberlain as a lambda spectator in the audience with a heavy valve said so lightly that we laugh.
Like everything else.
Alain Chabat, seated behind his little table - the host of a Late Show is always crouched behind a small elegant desk, Drucker's anti-sofa, because here there will be no other complicity than self-mockery - receives Jean Dujardin, also undermined as for an evening of Caesar.
They will say to themselves… Nothing.
And it will last… For a long time.
Some didn't like it.
On Twitter, some regret that there was not even a single "real" question.
No, the spirit is rather, “So, Jean, after “November”, which is a great success, there is… December?
".
“Yes, replies the actor, December and Christmas, a great holiday”.
“For our loved ones,” murmurs Chabat.
Con for some, hilarious for others.
The facilitator multiplies the sheets like an Ardisson of the great era but stumbles on his questions like a schoolboy.
A real number.
A little long, it seems.
Maybe.
Like those whites in a dinner that doesn't take, but here it was the idea, to laugh at the discomfort.
Funny like Bacri, rather.
The spirit of historic Canal +
Enter comedian Tania Dutel.
Always on the line.
Period jokes.
We are still there.
Only downside: Chabat's slightly too visible laughter.
But it goes fast.
Jean-Pascal Zadi arrives on the set to "play a game".
A sort of more hyped "A hunter who knows how to hunt" where you have to take less than two seconds then seven to read increasingly long texts.
A battle, funny.
And Dujardin returns.
He plays the double bass on Chabat's belly.
Ah, we had forgotten: a Late Show is also a live orchestra, which plays the arrival of the guests, bounces, launches the names, gives rhythm.
That, we have already seen at Ardisson.
The fake Zadi-Dujardin scandal and his Oscar "in your ass" for the one who puts forward his César, excellent performances too, in a mixture of candor and millimeter game in advance.
In a Late Show, the guests are not on promotion, even if they have news that will not be referred to except in the form of trash to take down or administrative mail to deal with over the leg.
They can only sell themselves, their funny presence or not, their cathodic explosiveness.
We have it or not.
They got it.
Chabat made fun of his age, 63, his hair and his white beard, but like a rapper, the filmmaker of "Didier", the creator of the "Burger Quiz" comes to put his title on the line by proposing what he does best: invent a moment of TV.
Only ten performances of the Late Show, like a series of concerts.
He doesn't fit in.
So yes, the audience is perhaps the least of his worries: 1 million and dust, 10%, it seems that it is not great for the "box".
Ok, but laughing out loud, between eleven o'clock and midnight, rediscovering the spirit of historic Canal +, it feels like coming back to it this evening.
To decompress after France-Australia and a football magazine stuffed with statistics, comments and go Blues, laugh at everything about absolutely nothing, it will be good.
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