The youngest followers of laughter know Éric and Ramzy or Kad and Olivier.
But whatever their talents, the idea of the comic duo was not born with them.
In 1952, a little by chance, at the turn of an audition at the Sarah-Bernhardt theater, Jean Poiret and Michel Serrault met.
The current passed immediately with jokes.
A few months later "
Poiret et Serrault
", in a jazz club on rue Dauphine, le Tabou, created their first sketch,
The Return of Jerry Scott, international star
.
Read also Michel Serrault or communicative joviality
As is often the case with all entertainers, they were going to slay the stupidity of their contemporaries.
In the midst of the glorious thirties, eight years after the end of the war, the beginnings of the consumer society would give them a myriad of ideas: the circulation and the embarrassments of Paris, - long before the environmentalist inventions of Anne Hidalgo -, literary prizes, the art of playing sports ... everything will be good for them to make the difficult customers of cabarets laugh.
Read also The Eye of the INA:
La Cage aux folles
, unpublished images
Their sketches are based on a mirror effect. Poiret dons the attire of a seemingly serious white clown and Serrault those of an august, this red-nosed clown who makes children cry with laughter. The mechanics are unstoppable. On a jerky flow, Poiret launches the subjects and then Serrault's repartee is accompanied by a mimicry which belongs only to him. This unique gift will earn him three Caesars ... thirty years later.
It is by tidying up the cupboards that the children of our duettists found the manuscripts of their first funny sketches.
By rediscovering these nuggets Nicolas and Sylvie Poiret but also for her part Nathalie Serrault say to each other without consulting each other, all this deserves to be set in stone, that is to say reissued in a book, in the form of a compilation of sketches.
The humor of Poiret and Serrault finally has its breviary.
It follows a common thread that Michel Serrault will define once and for all: “
It was stronger than us, we had to make every conversation go wrong, that's how we built all our sketches.
"
See again and hear Poiret and Serrault again
Some of these nuggets were preserved or re-recorded a few years later.
They denounce, twenty years in advance, the fashions of our societies and the behavior of the men who compose them.
The art of making a soap opera with friend Pierre Tchernia, the exacerbated preciousness of two homosexual antique dealers who announce the delusions of this
Cage aux folles
which will be played until Broadway and the rebellion of this Mr. Schnops who regrets that Switzerland is too calm,
Le Figaro
exhumed them.
For the better and for the laughs, anthology in five recordings of the sketches of Poiret and Serrault.
The best time to schedule a show
The empty armchair or the great anguish of the authors.
In February 1959, Pierre Tchernia, friend of the two acrobats, takes them for the needs of a TV show behind the scenes of a theater.
They will discuss the art of choosing the right release date for a play: Before Christmas, during Christmas, after Christmas, that is the question ...
Antique dealers
Close observers will see the ancestors of Albin and Georges, the very precious heroes of La Cage aux Folles, among these antique dealers.
Others nostalgic will also recognize a formidable "
boulevardier
" in the role of the customer, Michel Roux.
And for the story to be complete, this visibly highly demanding client will turn into a client a few years later, with the irresistible Jacqueline Maillan.
The literary prize
Here, the presenter (Jean Poiret) skillfully mocks the writer Stéphane Brineville (Michel Serrault), whose great writing talent consisted in sending letters filled with postscript to his mother during her military service ... For the record, the recording was immortalized at the Comédie Française in 1974 in front of a choice audience made up of Louis Seigner, Annie Ducaux, Jacques Chancel, Jacques Sereys and Jean-Paul Belmondo.
Monsieur Schnops ... or Swiss tyranny
The transgression, the shift ... to confuse the Soviet and Swiss tyrannies, all the art of communicative gaiety of Poiret and Serrault is found in this sketch with this unstoppable reply from Schnops the Swiss: "
And then, at home, not for example, no captain, no Joan of Arc;
no one has ever kicked the English out of Switzerland!
"
The art and manner of making soap operas ...
We are in 1963 and television is already becoming the king media.
With Pierre Tchernia, the two friends strive to say all the bad things they think about what we do not yet call the series ...
