Not So Funny

The comic is a candidate

The lights go down, the band strikes up, and the pudgy, red-nosed man in striped overalls trots onstage dragging a battered suitcase. France's favorite comedian Michel Colucci--known better as Coluche--is opening his nightly act at Paris' Theatre du Gymnase. "Hey," Coluche begins in his usual patois, "we've negotiated a fantastic deal with the Soviets: we give them all our wheat, and they let us keep our coal." The son of an Italian immigrant house painter, Coluche, 36, has now become something more than a nightclub satirist puncturing the pretensions of politicians and diplomats in the coarse argot of la France profonde--the real France of factory workers, small farmers and shopkeepers. He has announced himself as a candidate in next year's presidential election, and according to one poll, 10% to 12% of Coluche's countrymen say they would vote for him.

All of which means Coluche is no joke to France's political Establishment. No other candidate for the Elysee Palace, left or right, has excited such a public response. In nightly routines that have turned into informal campaign speeches, Coluche presents himself as the champion of voters alienated from politics-as-usual and dissatisfied with predictable contenders. "A vote for me is an idiot vote," says Coluche. "But a vote for any of them is an imbecile vote." Professional politicians fear that Coluche's listeners may agree with his message. Says a Gaullist presidential candidate, Marie-France Garaud: "One should weep over his candidacy. It shows the disintegration of democracy."

What makes Coluche's move into politics viable at all is that the comedian has focused on problems that do disturb ordinary French voters. Unemployment has reached a near record 6.3%; the inflation rate is 13.5%. President Valery Giscard d'Estaing is expected to defeat his most serious opponent, only because his opposition on the left is so divided. Coluche is filling a void. More than 200 Coluche-for-President committees have sprung up across France, and he is confident that he will get the 500 signatures of elected local officials he needs to be placed on the ballot: there are, after all, more than 40,000 such officials to approach.

Coluche has pledged that he will quit the race next April after the first of the two rounds of voting for the presidency. "I don't want or expect to get elected," he insists, "but I want enough votes for all hell to break loose. Ideally, I'd like to create enough of a mess to provoke a crisis. What France really needs is a new constitution that distributes power more evenly instead of making the President a virtual monarch." That point has been seriously argued by some pundits. A few more such remarks and Coluche could begin sounding like a real politician.

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