The three figures from the world of humor to whom we are going to pay tribute all knew they were doomed, and yet they did everything to make us laugh until the end.
It’s hard not to start with Wahid Bouzidi who died at the age of 45 in August in Morocco following a stroke. The comedian was revealed by the Jamel Comedy Club in 2006 before becoming one of its leading figures. The health of this good-natured joker had been in decline for several years and, in 2021, he had already had to deal with two successive strokes which, he knew, did not bode well.
Guillaume Bats will have had an even shorter life, since he died at only 36 years old last June. Noticed on the Web before seducing the audience of Laurent Ruquier’s show We just want to laugh about it in the 2010s, Guillaume Bats distilled a humor that was as black as it was corrosive and spared no one. Suffering from brittle bone disease, this is the way he found to box.
The clown king
We end with a humor personality perhaps less known to younger people, but who nevertheless left his mark on the profession in his time. This is Jango Edwards. Born Stanley Ted Edwards in 1950 in Detroit, he is credited with having modernized the art of clowning, founding the “new clown” movement thanks to the enormous success he had experienced in Europe from the 1980s. It was in France that Jango Edwards first flourished, triumphant at Splendid, then alongside Antoine de Caunes on the set of Nowhere else.
But it was ultimately in Barcelona that he settled down, even opening an institute dedicated to his practice in 2009. It was there that he died at the age of 73, lost to cancer .