As of: March 18, 2024, 6:12 p.m
By: Rudolf Ogiermann
Comments
Press
Split
“I made jokes about myself before the others could make them”: Munich comedian Simon Pearce looks back on an eventful childhood.
© Tabea Hofmann/BR
He started as an actor and eventually made humor his profession - Simon Pearce, son of the German actress Christiane Blumhoff and the Nigerian Charles Pearce.
He is now on the road with his third solo “Hybrid”.
A portrait.
It takes a certain amount of extroversion to go on stage and make people laugh.
And of course acting talent, good timing, good punchlines.
For Simon Pearce, comedy was also a kind of “self-therapy,” as he himself admits.
As a black man, the Munich native has had experiences with racism for as long as he can remember - and reacted to it with humor.
“It was a kind of protective shield, especially in my childhood and youth.
I made jokes about myself before the others could make jokes about me,” says the 42-year-old in an interview with our newspaper.
“Humor is my defense”
is also the title
of a portrait of the artist from the
“Lines of Life”
series , which BR television is showing today at 10 p.m.
“Defense” sounds kind of martial, but in his case it’s not too big of a word.
“Once,” he says in the film, he “got really pissed off,” and another time he was only able to escape the beatings of neo-Nazis by running away.
Worse, however, are the many small nasties that he was and continues to be exposed to because of his skin color - to this day.
Little Simon didn't let this get him down; he responded by making people laugh.
The talent for this was probably born in his cradle; his mother was the popular actress Christiane Blumhoff (1942-2023).
She herself had to struggle with rejection when she married the Nigerian Charles Pearce in the mid-1970s and had three children with him.
Suddenly role offers became rare.
Simon, their youngest, played theater as a teenager, and later, after abandoning his teaching studies, he completed acting training in Munich.
The “cliched roles” that he often had to play afterwards frustrated him and ultimately led him to do his own thing on the cabaret stage.
“He had to fall down a bit in acting to get into comedy,” a friend puts it in the film.
Things have gotten better with the roles, Pearce assures us in an interview.
Since more attention has been paid to diversity, “I can no longer blame the television people for this.”
“Do you remember?” Simon reminisces with his sister Nancy (left) and mom Christiane Blumhoff.
The popular actress died last year.
© Tabea Hofmann/BR
Pearce is doing well as an actor and podcaster, but comedy remains his passion.
The spectrum of his numbers has become broader, he states, especially in “Hybrid”, his current program: “There are still two or three stories in there that relate to my skin color, but otherwise they are completely normal, everyday observations that everyone else does could also bring to the stage.” He gradually gained a different self-image: “I have more courage to be on stage the way I want to be and not the way I think people want me to be .” He wants to talk about his experiences and, in the process, promote tolerance, says Simon Pearce – not just towards black people.
“We should generally learn again to listen to each other, take each other seriously and try to find a common path,” is his appeal.
It felt like more and more and smaller camps were forming, which were becoming more and more irreconcilable towards each other: “According to the motto: Anyone who doesn't agree with me is an idiot.
But we can’t move forward like this.”
Simon Pearce will play his program “Hybrid” again on April 4th, 8 p.m., in the Lustspielhaus and on May 16th, 8 p.m., in the Altes Speicher in Ebersberg.