To the question, "Can you laugh at everything?" French humorist Pierre Desproges replied, in an almost definitive fashion: "You can laugh at everything, but not with everyone." The question, which smells of a philosophical dissertation, is regularly posed in the French public debate, and "not so funny" stories sometimes lead to court proceedings.
Pierre Siankowski, journalist on the cultural magazine Les Inrockuptibles
While French legislation is fairly tolerant about comedy, which enjoys, like any art form, the primacy given to "freedom of expression" in the Constitution, it still must be able to show that it is indeed a question of freedom of speech, at the risk of being taken to court for "slander" or "defamation".
"You can laugh at anything, yes, provided it’s funny", one could say. That is the challenge, and it is a sizeable one. For, at a time of crises of identity, society’s increasing readiness to sue and the triumph of "political correctness" &emdash; which has the particular merit of sensitising opinion to the problem of discrimination &emdash; comedy, like any other form of expression, is subject to strong pressures.
Does laughing necessarily imply poking fun, pointing the finger or stigmatising someone? Can comedy only work at someone else’s expense along the lines of the famous "custard pie" gag? Legally, the boundary between "funny" and "not funny" is very difficult to establish, that is a certainty. What makes some laugh leaves others cold, or even offends them. Like classic tragedy, comedy must be able to obey the unities of time and place: "You can laugh at anything, but not anywhere or any time" one could suggest. But as well as the importance of the place and climate &emdash; of tension &emdash; in which jokes are made, it is above all the subtlety of the comedy and the atmosphere that make the difference, that legitimise the humour, even the cheekiest.
When Desproges mimics Adolf Hitler, when Coluche sends up police officers, when Valérie Lemercier shows her breasts on stage or when the very popular Jamel Debbouze overtly has a dig at Bernadette Chirac, the boundaries may be crossed, from a strictly legal point of view, but everyone laughs with them. A question of talent? A question primarily of intention, for these comics are constantly searching for a universal and inclusive form of comedy. Sometimes very acid and adept at flirting with the boundaries, performers like Coluche and Desproges have always succeeded in protecting themselves, perhaps by thinking of comedy as a "wish to laugh together", a way of putting that would undoubtedly have startled them. Nonetheless, this sums up a wish not to exclude, to think of humour as something that brings people together, something for which the law then has an intense respect. For what is certain is that when it sets everyone laughing, comedy is protected from everything and everybody. "You can laugh at anything, but on condition that everyone laughs", would thus be one part of the response, but one that would certainly not have pleased Pierre Desproges.