It's an old friend of 40 years who swears to you. There will only have been one Paul Houde. A volcano of intelligence, talent, love of life and career. A comedian who didn't need lines, who created by blinking. He loved to play, have fun, interpret and, above all, make people laugh. Sometimes he took himself seriously and it worked. He was fundamentally brilliant and he liked to flaunt it, demonstrate it.
Do you want a good one? Paul Houde, who was Fern at Les Boys, was never a goalkeeper. He made producer Richard Goudreau's team believe that he had experience on the net. It was wrong. He trained in secret and learned quickly on the job, spending hours in the arena without anyone knowing. He wanted the role, he wanted to be in Les Boys and he won his bet. His understudy was often none other than Kim St-Pierre, the Olympic champion.
He was constantly reading, saving and searching. His neurons clung to everything. Astronomy, wrestling, the Chicago Blackhawks, politics, athletics, history, you name it. Francine, his wife, could tell he was dizzy, he was never in rest mode. In recent years he should have gone into an RV and taken it easy, but no. He left to conquer the United States and returned with so many video documents that he made television shows.
We were competitors on the radio for several years. Well, it was more our stations fighting against each other. Paul and I loved performing spontaneous pieces together, and he had a talent for imitation that no one else had. Claude Raymond was truer than reality. His Ti-Guy Émond was never achieved. He was the only one to imitate Guy Lafleur and Jacques Lemaire, and he succeeded Ménick without ever having gone to Figaro on Rue Masson to have his hair cut.
Paul didn't just perfect his victim's voice. He put himself in his character's shoes and very quickly and skillfully turned it into a caricature.
In the early 1980s, I was a sports columnist for his morning show on CKMF and also his sidekick. Giggles I'll never forget. I also think about the evening after his wedding to Francine in a fancy restaurant in Old Montreal.
What can we say about this scene that André Dubois wrote for the TVA show Rira bien, in which Paul and I had to kiss each other on the lips? We had to re-shoot the last take at least ten times and we both cried… Yes, we cried with laughter.
We traveled to Mexico with our sons Paul-Frédéric and my Simon. I was with three wrestling geeks who knew and talked about all the WWF stars. However, I spent the late evenings with Paul when, with a good little glass of red wine, lying on his back and watching the sky, he explained to me with so much passion the composition of the stars. It was one of his angry follies.
I refuse to believe he's gone. Like every time we lose someone we love, someone we admire, we wonder why we don't see them as much anymore. He accompanies his friend Michel Côté and also Pierre Rinfret, who was his accomplice during his years at CFGL.
Hello Paul Houde.