After 20 years of making crowds laugh across Quebec, André Sauvé wants to close this chapter. The comedian, who is releasing a book this week revisiting the lyrics from his first three shows, is pondering a possible onstage sequel that won’t necessarily be funny.
“I want to express myself in a new way that requires perhaps a more intimate packaging and a more stripped-down show. We can laugh and sometimes we can’t. I don’t necessarily want to use the term “one-man show humor” anymore.”
The comedian, who turns 58 in December and lives in the French department of Hautes-Alpes, is exhausted from the long tours – his last one was even longer due to the pandemic – and is thinking about another sequel.
The spark plug came to him while he was working on the book Monologues and Unforeseeable Detours, out tomorrow, in which he revisits the remarkable monologues from his first three shows.
Cover of the book by André Sauvé.
“I didn’t want to just copy and paste the text of my shows,” he says. As I looked at them again, I realized I still had something to say on these topics. This made this writing exercise possible. […] Through writing these new lyrics I have found a new voice/way, a new way, a new way to express myself. We smile, but it’s perhaps less humorous, we smile more crookedly.”
More cinema
When André Sauvé reviewed the texts of his first solo exhibition, he was pleased to see that the material had aged well. “I’m talking about human functioning. If I had written about Jean Charest it might not have made it! I realized that over the course of my shows, questions about life kept coming up, but in a more asked way. In the first case it was a lot of fear and excess that had to come out. But the form calmed down over time.”
André Sauvé will also open the door to cinema wide in the coming years. In the mid-2000s, when he was just launching his first solo show, the comedian had received many acting offers. But too busy with his tour, he had to turn down almost everything, except for a small role in Filière 13.
Today his schedule has lightened up and he is ready for the big screen. “It’s something I’d like to have, but not necessarily in terms of humor,” he said. I would like to play something different and direct a character other than myself. I’m throwing this out into the universe!”
√ The book Unpredictable monologues and detoursby André Sauvé, will be available on Wednesday 1stum November.