With Jaune, Daniel Grenier creates with a panoply of unusual objects a show carried by his unfailing sense of wonder, the most improbable of odes to life.
“I’m going to start quietly, then at some point the chain will come down,” warns Daniel Grenier a few seconds after going on stage, before adding that in reality, “the chain has been off for a long time”. His followers did not fall out of their chairs: the comedian knows how to move forward only by freewheeling.
“I’m 50 years old”, he will repeat during this premiere evening, as if stunned by the madness of his own approach, that of an eternal adolescent whose fascination for the new paths in which his synapses can training him never wavered. And whose desire to make his friends laugh with the nonsense that seizes his thoughts would have remained intact.
With his two turquoise suitcases placed on either side of him on stools, Daniel Grenier practices what is called in English prop comedy, or if you prefer, comedy of objects. A genre of which Gallagher, in the 1970s and 1980s, and Carrot Top, in the 1990s, were the main American faces, but which, in Quebec, has been little embraced.
Unintentionally scary dolls, goons with hard-to-guess usefulness, cash register edge trinkets; Daniel Grenier has obviously scoured garage sales, church basements and other bizarre bazaars in order to unearth these objects whose main property is to set his noggin in motion.
This quest for the unusual object thus becomes the backstory of this second show entitled Jaune, which the ex-Chick’n Swell punctuates with stories related to his singular enterprise. One fine morning, as the others are heading to the office, Daniel Grenier struggles in the aisle of a dollar store trying to find the dog toys that would allow him to play Clear. of the moon, an essential mission that he accomplishes for our astounded eyes and ears.
Gaston Lepage, at the helm of Take up the challenge, would have been proud.
In Jaune, Daniel Grenier testifies to the mental convolutions to which he must submit in order to remember the meaning of the word misunderstanding, tries to understand why the onomatopoeias that the singer of Spin Doctors chants in Two Princes remain prisoners of his brain, reveals his point view of necrophilia and jump over school bus on motorcycle. It also features the first joke in the history of humor — or so it claims — offered through a QR code.
Rebus, nonos puns, childish songs. Daniel Grenier goes from one idea to another without them having a clear link between them, the comedian’s mind fluttering from one flash to the next like an insect attracted by a light. even more powerful. A modus operandi that the main interested party describes himself as nonsense, a definition that is nevertheless reductive.
Given its disheveled appearance, such a spectacle inevitably has its less strong moments, but listening to the laughs that echoed at Club Soda on Wednesday evening, the highlights of Jaune were not the same for the general audience. . In other words: there’s everything here, from the vulgar to the childish, and everything in between.
But, put end to end, these improbable finds of absurd jokes make up the quilt of an astonishing ode to the power of the imagination. As fifty-something as he is, Daniel Grenier remains this child inventor of worlds, who sees behind their surface all the potential for poetry contained in the language of everyday life and the useless objects that surround us.
In a rare, more serious passage, Daniel Grenier recounts how his brother and agent, Michel, told him, when they were both still young men, that their other brother was “maybe” dead, a tragedy that would be confirmed an hour later. It was during these sixty minutes of unimaginable anguish that the comedian’s brain would have “cracked”, he suspects.
This segment, between black humor and authentic confidences, perfectly sums up this seemingly insane work in which this gentle warrior of light is engaged, who manages to make a glimmer of wonder appear between the slits of a cheap toy. Faced with tragedy, the young bereaved chose thirty years ago to take refuge in the pure joy of his abundant inventiveness and has never turned away from it.
“I love life very much,” Daniel Grenier said towards the end of the evening. When we love, we are always 20 years old? Ferland’s song, taken from another work called Jaune, has never sounded so true.
