Posted Sep 29, 2022, 3:00 PM
“Elise Lucet in slim”, “falsely ingenuous flautist of the eco-citizen uproar”, “Frisbee thrower”… In his column in the Journal du Dimanche, Gaspard Proust does not lack imagination to invective the eco-journalist Hugo Clément, after the broadcast of his documentary on wine on France 5. The latter is only the latest target of the comedian, rather discreet about his private life, but who at only 46 years old has already several lives to his credit.
Despite his corrosive and questionable humorous traits on the Nazi regime, this subject touches him personally, he whose grandparents are a survivor of the Ravensbrück camp and a conscript in the German army… A hazardous union whose he is indeed the fruit, which his atypical career only confirms.
Before mastering the language of Molière, Gašper Pust, his real name, lived in Slovenia; it was the twelve years he spent in Algeria, where his father worked, that enabled him to learn French. The call of the boards is not immediately felt: after studying at HEC Lausanne, he becomes an asset manager. A profession that does not suit him, however. The tidy sums he earns for three years having little meaning in his eyes, he ends up resigning out of “survival instinct” and turning to mountaineering before embarking on his new passion: comedy.
A self-taught actor in reinvention
In Paris, Gaspard adopted the stage name of Proust (in reference to Marcel and “to be sure that it was pronounced correctly”) and perfected his caustic humor and his character as a lettered misanthrope. Quickly, the “emotional underdeveloped” as he baptizes his first show is spotted by Laurent Ruquier who becomes his producer.
Actor Gaspard Proust with director Frédéric and actress Louise Bourgoin, December 21, 2011 for his first film ‘Love lasts three years’.AFP PHOTO/GERARD JULIEN
The self-taught actor thus experienced a meteoric rise both in the theater with his show “Gaspard Proust tapine” in 2011 at the Théâtre du Rond-Point, on TV with Ardisson and in the cinema in films like “Love lasts three years”. and “L’Idéal” by Frédéric Beidegber. Some of the critics are won over by this slayer of hypocrisy who won a Crystal Globe in 2015 for the best one-man show of the year.
But in recent years, in a society hit by repeated crises, the humor of Gaspard Proust who “constantly presses on what hurts, in front of people who can no longer bear it”, like the character of Fiodor Pavlovich in “The Kzaramazov Brothers” by Dostoievsky, is increasingly divisive. Her “New Show,” which aired last December on Amazon Prime, is also her last to date.
The actor prefers to express himself in the press and on the radio. Each week, his chronicles vitriol the personalities of contemporary society, from Zelensky to Taubira. Since September 16, Gaspard Proust has also appeared in Sebastien Thiéry’s play “Tomorrow’s Revenge”, at the Antoine Theater.
Laugh at everything with anyone?
Even if the media try to put him in the shoes of Pierre Desproges, the devilish provocateur always ready to take the opposite view of well-meaning, the filiation is not so obvious for Proust who does not claim to be elsewhere not from his inheritance. More probably than a question of generation. Where Desproges declaimed an indictment against Jean-Marie Le Pen, this “sniper of humor” appears in a meeting organized by Valeurs Actuelles…
Indeed, on March 23, 2022, in the heart of the electoral campaign, the public of activists, not necessarily followers of the second degree, discovered him on stage in Tyrolean panties, his usual stage costume. And although his humor does not, as usual, spare any political party, nor the National Front or the newspaper which invited him “to put people at ease”, the presence of the artist in the first part of the debate which notably included Eric Zemmour, Marion Maréchal, Eric Ciotti but also Valérie Pecresse and Marlène Schiappa, caused a reaction.
Anti-left, anti-right, divisive, this lover of wine, great music (he dreams of becoming a conductor) and mountains (if we are to believe the few posts on his Instagram account), loves nothing less only to confuse the tracks. Hidden behind the rampart of his humorous alter ego, we don’t know what the man Le Monde described as a decade had his sketch at the meeting of Valeurs Actuelles of “Eric Zemmour of comedy” really thinks… And it suits him very well .
