Introduction: the origins of the Jamel Comedy Club

Jamel Comedy Club has played a major role in helping to increase the popularity and prominence of stand-up comedy in France. It has taken on additional cultural significance due to the ways in which many of its leading performers have sought to articulate visions of Frenchness. This chapter will explore the origins of the Jamel Comedy Club and the role that it has played in redefining comedy in France as well as the visions of French society that it has projected. Given that one of the often-cited objectives of the programme was to provide a launch pad for the careers of up-and-coming stand-up comedians in France, it will examine the career trajectories of the cohort of comedians that featured in the first two television series broadcast in 2006 and 2007, and analyse what these tell us about humour in France. This chapter will show that many of the influences on performers who were part of the initial television series of the Jamel Comedy Club were American or British rather than French. It will again examine relations between the media and comedy, both by assessing how and why Canal Plus helped to launch the Jamel Comedy Club and also by discussing media reactions to the initiative.

Just as the concept of multiculturalism is often seen as being un-French, it can also be said that socio-political and cultural issues mean that a large part of the Jamel Comedy Club's significance stems from adopting an approach that challenges key tenets of French Republicanism. Republicanism's universalist ethos means that it does not generally identify the presence of different groups within society based on criteria such as ethnicity or social class. It instead focuses on people having a relationship with the state as individual citizens; furthermore, its egalitarian principles mean that it is not possible to officially quantify the number of people from different ethnic or racial groups. However, the Jamel Comedy Club celebrates diversity and socioethnic identities in a manner that is not fully consistent with some of the aforementioned aspects of France's egalitarian Republican ethos. Indeed, it does so by utilizing an art form that is considerably more associated with American and British culture than it is with French culture.