Imaginary interview with Copi
by Charactorium · Copi (1939 — 1987) · Literature · Visual Arts · Performing Arts · 5 min read
Paris, early 1980s. In a small café on the Left Bank, a stone's throw from the theaters where he creates his plays, Copi lights a cigarette and sets his sketchbook on the zinc counter. The Argentine-born French-language cartoonist, playwright, and actor agrees to talk — in his own way, between bursts of ferocious laughter.
—Who was the child called Copi, before Paris?
I was Raúl Damonte Botana, a little boy from Buenos Aires whom his grandmother nicknamed Copi like you'd pet a cat. Picture the scene: a family of journalists, my grandfather Natalio Botana who had founded Crítica, one of Argentina's great newspapers, and ink everywhere, on fingers, on tablecloths. Then politics threw us onto the roads, between Argentina and Uruguay, those exiles that stitch two languages into your mouth. You think a child who travels loses his country; I gained a distance. That distance, that slight gap between oneself and the world, is perhaps where humor is born. I never had a homeland, only streetcars and borders.
I never had a homeland, only streetcars and borders.
—How did Argentina continue to live in your work once you settled in Paris?
It never left, you know. You think you flee a country, you carry it like a suitcase too heavy. In 1955, the fall of Perón reshuffled the cards, exiles, returns, a family that no longer knew which shore to sleep on. I turned all that into fantasy rather than complaint. In Life Is a Tango, I let Argentine family memory, exile, the grotesque resurface, and I mix everything like shuffling a rigged deck. Mate, grilled meat from the Río de la Plata, it stays in a corner of the tongue even when you write in French. An Argentinian in Paris is a ghost who speaks with the accent of two deaths.
You think you flee a country, you carry it like a suitcase too heavy.
—Tell us about that little woman seated on her chair that readers found every week.
Ah, my Seated Woman! Every week, in Le Nouvel Observateur, she was there, planted on her chair, unable to get up, condemned to chatter. She talks about life, death, boredom, with a duck that never really answers — the ideal interlocutor, mute and impassive. I think I loved her because she didn't move an inch while the whole world was in turmoil. A simple, nervous line, a pen dipped in the absurd: it doesn't take much to convey the immobility of our lives. People laughed, then they felt a little chill down their spine. That's exactly where I wanted to hold them, between laughter and vertigo.
She didn't move an inch while the whole world was in turmoil.
—What attracted you to weekly press cartooning, this discipline of the deadline?
The gentle tyranny of the week! You have to deliver, always, the strip is expected, the newspaper doesn't forgive. In the morning — well, my night owl morning — I'd sit at my drawing board, pen at my fingertips, and an idea had to spring from nothing. That constraint is a gift: it forbade me from taking myself seriously. A mute skit, two or three lines, my little woman on her chair, and there you have a whole barroom metaphysics. I think press cartooning taught me theater before theater: framing, cutting, dropping the punchline at the right moment. A duck that says nothing is sometimes worth more than a tirade.
A mute skit, two or three lines, and there you have a whole barroom metaphysics.
—You wrote your plays directly in French, a language that wasn't your own. How did you experience this wrestling?
French was not my mother tongue, and that's precisely why I loved it so much: I could mistreat it without remorse, like a foreign lover. On my typewriter, every French sentence was a small conquest, a misplaced word, a mistake that becomes a discovery. The title says it all: The Homosexual or the Difficulty of Expressing Oneself. All my writing is a difficulty of expressing oneself turned into a party. A writer born into his language glides; I stumbled, and the stumble made people laugh. The French language, when you're not born into it, you hear it better — its ridiculousness, its stiffness, its music. I wrote like a smuggler writes: fraudulently, with delight.
I wrote like a smuggler writes: fraudulently, with delight.
—What did you seek to provoke in the spectator with this ferocious humor?
A joyful scandal, that was my dream. Not sour protest, no — laughter that overflows and embarrasses. My shows mixed cross-dressing, fantasy, provocation, and people didn't know whether to applaud or flee. That's the only place I like: cheerful discomfort. I think mockery is a politeness toward despair; you make fun of everything, including death, so as not to let it have the last word. When I wrote a line, I wanted it like a slap given with a smile. Polite theater bores me to death. I prefer an audience that leaves the theater slightly wounded and unable to say why they laughed so much.
Mockery is a politeness toward despair.
—You went on stage yourself, in a dress and wig. What happened when you embodied your characters?
Cross-dressing wasn't a disguise, it was an additional truth. Dresses, wigs, outlandish makeup: I put on another skin and suddenly I could say anything. In Loretta Strong, that delirious science-fiction monologue I performed alone, I blasted into space, screaming, strapped with wires, surrounded by pipes, and the audience got dizzy with me. Playing your own monsters yourself is dizzying: you have no one to hide behind. The stage costume liberated me instead of masking me. I think a man in a dress spouting cosmic horrors has come closer to truth than a notary in a three-piece suit. The stage was my only country without borders.
Cross-dressing wasn't a disguise, it was an additional truth.
—The solitude of the monologue, that exercise where you were alone facing the audience — why did you return to it?
Because there is nothing more naked than an actor alone on stage. A monologue like Loretta Strong is a voluntary shipwreck: you go into space, you talk to the dead, to aliens, to no one, and the audience becomes your only accomplice. I loved that gentle madness, that delirium held at arm's length for an hour. My little Seated Woman already did that in her panels: alone, she chatted with a mute duck. The monologue is the same chair, but on the boards of the Left Bank. Alone, you can't cheat: either you hold the thread of madness, or you fall. That risk, that tightrope over the void, was my reason for going on.
A monologue is a voluntary shipwreck of which the audience is the sole accomplice.
—You participated in the FHAR in early 1970s Paris. What did this activism mean to you?
The FHAR, the Homosexual Front for Revolutionary Action, in 1971: it was the time when, in Paris, people decided to stop apologizing for existing. I brought what I knew how to do: mockery, provocation, laughter as a weapon. The counterculture of those years was bubbling, and for once celebration and struggle marched in step. I never liked grave speeches, solemn platforms; my way of being an activist was to put on a dress, to say the unspeakable on stage, to make freedom desirable rather than austere. Visibility, yes, but joyful, insolent. You don't liberate people by boring them. You liberate them by showing that you can laugh at everything, even your own fear.
You don't liberate people by boring them.
—How could provocation, in your view, be an art rather than mere noise?
Provocation isn't breaking windows for the sound of glass. It's the art of the precise spot where it hurts and makes you laugh at the same time. When I wrote my plays, or sketched my skits, I looked for the fault line — the little convention that cracks. A transvestite philosopher, a seated woman talking about death to a duck: these are time bombs wrapped in candy paper. All my life, between drawing, theater, and the novel, I wanted the same thing: for people to think they were watching a farce and leave with a splinter in their conscience. Counterculture taught me that seriousness is often the last refuge of cowards.
Time bombs wrapped in candy paper.
This imaginary interview was generated by artificial intelligence from sources documented in Copi's profile. It dramatises what the figure might have said based on what we know about them, but does not constitute attested historical testimony. For primary sources and factual documentation, refer to the full profile.