Imaginary interview with Raymond Devos
by Charactorium · Raymond Devos (1922 — 2006) · Performing Arts · Literature · 6 min read
Late afternoon at the estate of Saint-Rémy-lès-Chevreuse, in the Chevreuse valley. Between a clarinet resting on an armchair and a pile of scribbled notebooks, the man in the dark suit receives us, a mischievous glint in his eye. He speaks slowly, as if weighing each word before letting it go.
—Do you remember the child you were, before the stage?
I was born in Mouscron, Belgium, a stone's throw from the French border, in 1922. That is to say, on the edge of one country and on the edge of another — I spent my life inhabiting the in-betweens. When the 1929 crisis ruined my family, we moved down to the Paris region, and I learned about reality from the bottom up: handler, docker on the docks, apprentice in a grocery store weighing sugar. People think these jobs have nothing to do with words. Think again. Carrying crates all day teaches you the weight of things, and a grocery store teaches you to count — but a sketch is arithmetic. So many silences, so many words, and above all: never give change too quickly.
I spent my life inhabiting the in-betweens.
—How did you experience your triumph at the Olympia in 1963?
The Olympia, in 1963, was the culmination of a very long detour. Before headlining there, I had toured the venues as a supporting act, that thankless position where you warm up the stage for someone else, where you learn to win over an audience that didn't come for you. I also started as a duo, with Roland Dubillard, playing Parisian music hall with two voices. Then one day you find yourself alone, facing that black hole of the auditorium, with a microphone on a stand as your only companion. That night at the Olympia, I felt the silence was on my side. Laughter, you see, is a fall; but the audience must consent to fall with you. They fell. And I, the son of a ruined family, finally had enough to fill my pockets — with words.
—How does a sketch like 'Caen' come about, that famous misunderstanding about a city?
It all starts with a slipping ear. One day, the word Caen and the adverb when met in my head and refused to part. 'I was the other day in Caen on business. Leaving the station, I saw a train leaving. I would have liked to take it... It was leaving for Caen, at the same time as me. ' You see: the traveler never arrives, because the place and the moment have become the same word. That's the pun — not a schoolboy prank, but a little trapdoor opened under language. You think you're walking on solid ground, and the floor of words gives way. I just listen to language when it stammers, and I rush into the stammer.
You think you're walking on solid ground, and the floor of words gives way.
—What are you looking for when you dismantle the logic of language like that, as in 'The Pleonasm'?
I look for the place where common sense trips over the rug. Take The Pleonasm: 'I who am speaking to you, one day I happened to climb up a tree. You'll tell me: you can't climb down! Of course! But you can climb down! ' There, I push logic so far that it turns against itself like a glove. Paradox is not a showman's trick, it's a hygiene: it forces you to look at the words you use without seeing them. We spend all day going up and down, without ever noticing it. My job is to notice it out loud, and to make you a witness.
I push logic so far that it turns against itself like a glove.
—They say your best ideas came to you at night. How did you work?
I am a man of the night and a man of walking. Ideas don't come when you summon them sitting at a table; they come stealthily, between two sleeps, or around a bend on a path. So I always have my notebooks within reach, even upon waking, to catch the word that surfaced while I was sleeping — because a pun evaporates as quickly as a dream. In the morning, I jot down; in the afternoon, I polish. I say each sentence out loud, over and over, to listen to its music — because a false line sounds like a wrong note. These notebooks are my real laboratory, more than the stage. The stage is already the hour of results.
A pun evaporates as quickly as a dream.
—You are described as an almost morbid perfectionist. Is that an exaggeration?
Hardly! I have kept a sketch for months, sometimes years, in a drawer, because it wasn't yet worthy of being performed. People think a comedy routine is improvised. But making people laugh is clockwork: a single gear — one word too many, a misplaced comma — and the whole mechanism jams, leaving the audience stone-faced. Silence on stage is not emptiness; it's a time I have calculated, adjusted, tested. I cut, I plane, I put it back on the workbench. A carpenter doesn't deliver a wobbly table; I don't deliver a wobbly line. That earned me a reputation as a detail obsessive. I prefer to say: a craftsman who respects the wood.
Making people laugh is clockwork.
—Behind the monologist, there was a true one-man band. Tell us about it.
Ah, I am often forgotten as a musician! Yet I played about fifteen instruments: the clarinet, piano, guitar, trumpet, and even the bass drum and brass band instruments for the racket. As a true one-man band, I slipped musical interludes between my texts, not for decoration, but because the word and the note are first cousins. A sentence has a tempo, a sketch has a score. When I picked up my clarinet in the middle of a show, I wasn't changing jobs: I was continuing the same conversation by other means. And then there was the comic contrast — a little round man grabbing a bass drum makes people laugh even before the first hit. Laughter sometimes arises from the mere contrast of sizes.
The word and the note are first cousins.
—Mime also played a large part in your art. Why this language of the body?
Because I didn't start with speech. At the Liberation, in 1945, I took mime and theater classes — I first learned to speak with my body before speaking with my mouth. Mime is the art of saying without a word, and it never left me. On stage, I sometimes wore a bowler hat, a nod to the clown, to play a character with a simple gesture. The body doesn't lie like language; it has no puns, it has falls, in the literal sense. A man slipping makes people laugh in every language, whereas a pun on Caen dies at the border. I always kept both legs: that of the word and that of the gesture. You never know which one will carry you.
The body doesn't lie like language; it has no puns, it has falls.
—In 1978, Jerry Lewis invited you to perform on Broadway. How do you meet such a challenge when your entire art rests on French?
What a strange bet, indeed! Jerry Lewis, admiring, opened the doors of Broadway, in New York, in 1978 — and there I was, summoned to make an audience laugh that didn't understand a single word of my puns. How do you translate Caen and when into American? You can't; the pun remains prisoner of its language. So I leaned on the other leg, that of mime. I adapted my routines so that gesture, rhythm, body carried what the word could no longer say. And they laughed! It was proof, on American boards, that the mechanism of laughter is deeper than languages — that it comes from a common ground, before we even start speaking.
The mechanism of laughter is deeper than languages.
—After so many years on stage, what still scares you before going on stage?
The same thing as on the first day: the intelligence of people. I always have this little prayer I recite backstage — 'My God, grant that I succeed, because it's not easy to make intelligent people laugh; fools are too easy. ' That's my real vertigo. You can wrench an easy laugh from anyone with a grimace; but making someone laugh who thinks, who sees you coming, who has read, who doubts — that is a battle every night. After my recognition at the Royal Academy of Belgium in 1989, people thought I had arrived, settled. But you are never settled facing an audience. Each performance starts from scratch, and the silence waits to see if, this night again, I deserve the laughter they might lend me.
You are never settled facing an audience.
This imaginary interview was generated by artificial intelligence from sources documented in Raymond Devos'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.