Toulouse: Baffie asks herself questions this Friday evening at the Barrière casino
Laurent Baffie, the famous “sniper” of the Paf, with a repartee as funny as it is scathing, is also a prolific author, whose plays (“Toc Toc”, “Les Bonobos” …) meet with wide public success everywhere. This evening he will be in a “one-man show” at the Casino Barrière for “Baffie asks himself questions”.
Let’s be honest: interviewer Laurent Baffie is no easy task. You have to winnow, chamber and you spend more time crying with laughter than rereading your notes. Fake bad guy, real nice guy with a big heart like that, Baffie is a very endearing man, terribly intelligent and, above all, irresistibly funny. Phone meeting as eventful as warm.
What are these “questions” that you ask in this new show?
Essential questions: do bipolar bears exist? Can an ephemeral procrastinate? Why when I dream that I fuck, I wake up too early, and when I dream that I pee, I wake up too late? We often wonder which comes first, the egg or the chicken, but can we bugger a chicken without breaking the egg? I’m like a schoolboy, a kid who asks questions in a naive way. I work empirically: every evening, I manage the valves that work and those that fall flat. It’s a live show, which applies all the time depending on the cities in which I play. I always ask myself a bunch of them and I fire the less funny ones when funnier ones come to mind. The goal is of course not to find an answer, but just to have a good time together.
Your sense of distribution is legendary: do you work on it?
It’s an art, it takes work. I tell myself jokes, I spend my life working on my repartee and I get sick of it when I miss a valve. In fact, I’m told that I go very fast, the sniper, all that, but the truth is that I don’t think: nothing goes through the brain, it comes straight out. I don’t have a filter. That said, it’s like a musician’s job: I do my scales regularly and when I make a quack, it bothers me. A good valve must be fast, fair, funny.
At the risk of hurting sometimes?
It happens, necessarily, so much so that some TV shows no longer want me when we’re live. I have often been briefed, asked not to broach such and such a subject, but all you have to do is tell me that for me to go straight to it! Often regretting it: I hate hurting people, I’m generally very, very bad afterwards. I have a fairly large “flower” budget!
Insolence and impertinence are lost… Do you appear to be the heir of Audiard, Desproges, Coluche?
You talk to me about geniuses, there… They are artists who integrated me, that’s obvious. Insolence must be benevolent, intelligent, otherwise it is only impertinent and mean. That’s not what I’m looking for. In this show, there is a lot of interactivity and I take advantage of this privileged privilege that I have with the public: I spot a few spectators quite early and… no, I won’t say more! In any case, in this somewhat gloomy period, I kept my part of the deal: people pay for me to make them laugh, and that’s exactly what I’m going to do. We will laugh, we promise!