‘Du Crésoxipropanédiol en capsule’. Jean Yanne's musical satire: ‘Interdit d’interdire’ or ‘chanter juste et penser faux’?

Abstract

The satirical songs of Jean Yanne (1933–2003) are a little-studied aspect of the work of this French singer-songwriter, comedian, actor and film director. Composed and performed in the late-1950s and mid-1960s Yanne's satirical music, like his radio and television comedy sketches, spoke to tensions in French politics and society during a period of rapid socioeconomic and sociocultural modernisation. Yanne's idiosyncratically derisive humour was controversial, dividing audiences and critics into those who saw the comedy and others suspecting him of right-wing anarchist nihilism. Analysis of his songs’ themes, lyrics and music shows how Yanne's musical satire continued and developed existing trends in humour and musical comedy, and discussion of how he was critiqued as ‘poujadist’ enables fuller understanding of the complexity of his oeuvre and its reception. Criticism of Yanne as poujadist aims to invalidate his satire, but ‘getting the joke’ equates, ultimately, to seeing his humour as freedom of speech.

Yanne: an under-examined musical iconoclast of the 1950s and 1960s

During recent years, there has been greater recognition of the significance of French humour within academic publications in both France and Anglophone ‘French studies’. ¹ The recent CNRS-supported study of French humour L’Empire du rire XXe -XXIe siècle (Letourneux and Vaillant, 2021) is a comprehensive survey, but even this magnum opus largely neglects the particular contribution of Jean Yanne (1933–2003) to (especially musical) humour and satire. ² This article highlights the significance of a multi-talented, yet somewhat overlooked artist through discussion of his controversial musical comedy during the early years of the Gaullist Fifth Republic. In so doing it engages with the ways in which Yanne himself played with categorisations of him and his work as either ‘left’ or ‘right’ and with the ways in which the charge of ‘poujadisme’ was used against him by critics. Public and critical reaction to Yanne was generally divided between those who ‘got the joke’, implicitly applauding the freedom of speech of his fearless exposure of difficult truths, ³ and others who were shocked by an apparent vicious nihilism and reactionary mindset. Yanne is either celebrated for a humour where it is ‘interdit d’interdire’ ⁴ or calomnied for ‘chanter juste et penser faux’. ⁵

Yanne's work touched popular song, comedy in clubs, satirical radio and television as well as the comic and serious acting and film directing for which he is principally known. Although differing aspects of his protean creativity informed each other, his career can be seen as – essentially – two-fold: until the late 1960s he worked in comedy, radio and music, but from the 1970s onwards he concentrated more on cinema, as actor, director or producer. ⁶ Following a training in journalism, Yanne's military service in the Parisian military headquarters at the Château de Vincennes finished in 1955. Being based in Paris had enabled him to continue performing comedy sketches and music in the Montmartre café-cabaret Les Trois Baudets. During the mid-1950s he started to develop the considerable oeuvre of popular satirical songs that he would ironically describe as his ‘chanson humanitaire et sociale’. ⁷ Musically, he performed and recorded both as Yanne and as ‘Johnny «Rock»feller’ (and ‘Les Rock Child’) or ‘Honzalagur Pompernickel et sa dame’. Most of Yanne's material was written or composed by himself, often with Gérard Sire, or Popoff (Jean Baitzouroff) and he was signed to Philips, Barclay and Mercury. His topical comic songs of the late 1950s and 1960s covered issues born of France's difficult acceptance of sociocultural and political change, as well as ironically addressing the importance and influence of popular music itself. The songs were technically accomplished and stylistically inventive – melding rock, reggae, spiritual with chanson – giving satirical interpretations of sex and gender relations, lost ambitions and disillusion, health, religion and politics.

The origins of Yanne's career were thus in chanson and (mostly) musical sketches, performed in Parisian cabarets and café-théâtres during the mid-late 1950s and 1960s, and also radio and television programmes for which Yanne wrote and performed iconoclastic songs, jokes and sketches. Yanne's humour prefigures that of heroes of French comedy such as Coluche and Pierre Desproges, and 1960s television and radio shows he invented or starred in are significant precursors to later iconic French satirical and comedy programmes. Emblematic programmes such as L’Oreille en coin (France-Inter, 1968–90), Les Grosses Têtes, co-founded by Yanne with Philippe Bouvard (RTL, since 1977), Le Bébête Show (TF1, 1982–95) and Les Guignols de l’info (Canal + , 1988–2018) owe much, directly or indirectly, to Yanne's comic and musical creativity during the 1950s and 1960s. ⁸

Academic work on Yanne's career in cinema has been – relatively – rare until recently, especially in Anglophone research. Only brief references appear in overviews of French cinema, apart from tangential discussions of his roles in Godard's Weekend (1967) or Chabrol's Le Boucher (1970). Greater analysis of his music can be found in studies of the 1970s blockbuster films starred in and directed by Yanne, whose style continued his earlier musical satire. ⁹ Riutort (2001) investigates Yanne's ‘dérision’ and ‘humeur anti-institutionnelle’; Du Mesnildot (2006) analyses him as the ‘sale type’ of France's new consumer society; and Krauss (2011) considers how comedic film can vehicle socially engaged politics. More recently, Clark (2019) has considered Yanne's Les Chinois à Paris (1974). Yanne's directoral cinema marked the mid-1970s and early-1980s, and he has been described as ‘l’iconoclaste de la France pompidolienne “franchouillard” et “beauf”’ (Bourbeillon, 1995), terms equally applicable to his music of the 1950s and 1960s.

According to Yanne, ‘Entre 1957 et 1971 j’ai fait n’importe quoi’ (Yanne, 2007: 9–10), seemingly disparaging his work before his later greater engagement with cinema. He was however famously ambivalent about acting, which he described as ‘un métier de perroquet’ (Le Fol, 2016), but this article will suggest that the ‘n’importe quoi’ of Yanne's comic song should in fact be seen as particularly meaningful in terms of the cultural heavy-lifting that it undertook in the 1950s and 1960s. This work involved both an ironic scrutiny of politics and society, and of music itself. Before considering the songs themselves, in the following section we consider how Yanne's humour and music have been viewed both in terms of the development of comedy in general in France and of locating him politically.

Yanne's humour: ‘Poujadisme intellectuel’ and ‘anarchisme de droite’?

Characterising Yanne's creativity is challenging, both because of the range of fields he covered and the complexity of his œuvres. ‘Satire’ is a central concept, nuanced by terms such as ironie, persiflage, humour, anarchie, nihilisme, acidité and cruauté. Underlying this is consistent stress on Yanne's social origins in working-class Paris in the 1930s and 1940s. And, believing that l’humour c’est l’homme même, commentators often construe Yanne's cultural destabilisation in music, comedy and film as (cultural) class warfare. It is this that underlies accusations that his humour is anarchy or nihilism. More balanced is an understanding – still linked to social class – of Yanne's style as ‘irrévérence populaire et spirituelle’ and emphasis on how he and collaborators Gérard Sire and Jacques Martin shared not class-based grievances but ‘hostilité à l’égard des corps constitués’ (Dubois, 2013: 9; 47). Institutions targeted by Yanne encompassed the ‘corps constitués’ of right and left, established culture, or novel cultural trends. He targeted both ‘reaction’ and ‘progress’: ‘Le ton rigolard de Jean Yanne et ses propos gentiment ironiques ne doivent pas nous leurrer : ce sont là les premières attaques d’un humoriste […] contre l’Eglise, et incidemment, contre le prolétariat’ (Mallat, 1997: 56).

Vaillant (Letourneux and Vaillant, 2021) usefully discusses the mid-twentieth century ‘traditions du rire et mutations culturelles’ framing Yanne's musical comedic satire, noting the importance of rive-gauche cabarets from the Liberation to the 1960s. Born of ‘circonstances exceptionnelles de l’histoire’ they were crucial in renewing comedy. The ‘institution’ of the cabaret was ‘radicalement nouvelle’, produced by ‘une ambiance poético-contestaire, une jeunesse enfiévrée et impatiente […]’ (Letourneux and Vaillant, 2021: 124–5). This fostered ‘chanteurs à texte’, comedians and comic singers such as Yanne. Yanne's satire of rock and roll was thus a recursive critique of the environment that encouraged his rise. Acknowledging Yanne as a significant cabaret singer-comedian, Vaillant notes that such humour no longer sought to ‘émouvoir’ but to ‘choquer et dérouter comiquement’ in registers ranging from ‘absurdisme farfelu, voire poétique, à un fond de provocation sociale ou morale’. Some of the best artists, Vaillant avers – such as Yanne – specialised in ‘cynisme’ and ‘méchanceté’: this was no longer the ‘rire fusionnel’ of the concert-halls of the interwar years (Letourneux and Vaillant, 2021: 127). Focus on ‘mean cynicism’ thus set Yanne apart from fellow singer-comedians, and musical comedy itself was progressively overshadowed from the 1950s by the rise of auteurs-compositeurs-interprètes typified by Brel, Brassens, Ferré, Ferrat et al., by American genres, and by music that ‘se passe de plus en plus souvent de faire rire’ (Letourneux and Vaillant, 2021: 113). ¹⁰ Yanne was thus in some ways a throwback to an earlier age of comedy where music played a greater role.

A frequent critical perspective has been that Yanne's world-view was ‘poujadiste’, and thereby – implicitly – beyond serious consideration. ¹¹ The charge of poujadism – or simply right-wing sympathies – levelled at popular musicians has some history, notably in the case of Michel Sardou, who in 1976 was famously epigraphed by Guy Bedos: ‘Sardou chante juste mais pense faux’ (Quinonero, 2018: 176). Beyond this mordacious bon mot, sociologists Louis-Jean Calvet and Jean-Claude Klein analysed the ‘Sardou phenomenon’ as a crisis of right-wing values in their vituperative pamphlet ‘Faut-il brûler Sardou ?’ (Calvet and Klein, 1978). Discussing whether Sardou was fascist or… poujadist, they concluded he was neither, and that the only poujadist singer in France at the time was Yanne's frequent collaborator Philippe Clay (Calvet and Klein, 1978: 12). Significantly, Calvet, Klein and Chantal Brunschwig in their Cent ans de chanson française (1972) eschewed any reference to Yanne, as though his music was beneath analysis. Yanne's biographer Bertrand Dicale explains how (reductively) interpreting Yanne as poujadist actually reflects his anti-conformism and dislike of lazy thinking rather than politics: ‘Jean Yanne n’a cessé de prendre ses contemporains à rebrousse-poil. On l’a traité d’anarchiste, de réactionnaire, de gauchiste, de poujadiste, et toujours avec raison : il a toujours heurté avec plaisir les catéchismes et les conformismes’. (Dicale, 2013). Yanne himself – disregardingly – rarely bothered (De Baecque, 2003) to deny such accusations. In 1973, Le Monde published verbatim arts critic Claude Sarraute's interview with Yanne – as his film Les Chinois à Paris neared completion – in which he touched ambiguously on his politics and humour. One passage is worth quoting extensively because its tone as much as its content illustrate Yanne's provocative playing with political labels:

On m’accuse toujours d’être poujadiste, oui. Ce n’est pas du tout ça. Fasciste, je comprendrais, ce serait beaucoup plus juste. Eh bien, si le fascisme c’est ça, c’est aussi ça, c’est une façon de prendre le pouvoir sans rien changer aux structures de la société. […] En fait, je serais plutôt anar. D’ailleurs, jeune, je militais pour l’anarchisme, pour une certaine idée de la société fondée sur la bonté. St tout le monde est gentil, ça doit marcher. Anarchiste de gauche, sûrement, encore que je ne vois pas très bien la différence entre la gauche et la droite. Ah ! bon, quand on ne voit pas la différence, c’est qu’on est… Et bien, alors, d’accord, je suis de droite. (Sarraute, 1973).

Also in 1973 actress Nicole Calfan (later Yanne's wife) was interviewed about her acting career (she was to play in Les Chinois à Paris in 1974) and the politics of Yanne's humour. She described Yanne as ‘beaucoup plus de gauche qu’il ne veut le paraître’, before adding ‘mais on combat souvent les choses qu’on aime’ and that ‘[Il] a une philosophie très pessimiste […] désespérée et épicurienne’. (E., 1973). Two decades later, when interviewed about accepting the role of Laval in Jean Marboeuf's film Pétain (1993), Yanne responded to criticism by ‘la gauche zozotante’ of his acting roles, humour and satire as intellectual poujadism. He explained that it was healthy for people to laugh at problems, and that he found humour everywhere except ‘mauvais goût’. Specifically, in terms of politics: ‘Le poujadisme… Comme tout le monde, je parle de la politique. Un peu. Le reste du temps, je vis, je réagis, selon le moment, face à des situations qui me hérissent. […] Droite ou gauche, ce jeu d’étiquette est ridicule’. (Honorez, 1992).

Another defence of Yanne against charges of poujadism comes from Fabrice Gardel, who considers his comedy sketches – and by extension songs – as social critique, not ideology. For Gardel, Yanne is never generally ‘idéologique’ or ‘poujadiste’ in particular, never targeting rich rather than poor or the powerful rather than the powerless. His comedic satire is even-handed, making magistrates, ‘fils à papa’, trades unionists, bosses and cops equally pathetic and equally funny: ‘La conscience sociale dans ses sketchs est omniprésente. […] Jean Yanne ne cherche pas à blesser. Son rire n’est pas poujadiste : il attaque la bêtise, jamais les faibles’. (Gardel, 2017: 17).

But what does this charge of ‘poujadisme intellectuel’ really mean? Thinking this through helps better understand elements of Yanne's musical satire, in the sense that many themes he addressed in his songs – examined in more detail below – and the tenor of his approach seemed to reflect a ‘poujadist’ critique. A movement of social, economic, cultural and political protest, Poujadism in mid-1950s France was contemporaneous with Yanne's early career, but as a term of invalidation applied both to politics or artistic creativity it still enjoys currency, particularly since the Gilet jaunes movement of 2018. Poujadism is notoriously protean in content, expression and how the term is used by its opponents, but it was/is, strictly ‘catégorielle’ and characterised by ‘popular’ negativity towards elites, intellectuals, power, expertise, privilege and most generally perhaps, ‘modernisation’. More than a party, in the 1950s it was principally a movement of protest (Shields, 2000; Souillac, 2007) against change imposed by elites on the common people. Establishing correspondences between Yanne's lower middle-class upbringing in Les Lilas and the ‘protest’ of his musical comedic satire against ‘corps constitués’ of all kinds, against social and cultural change, against perceived imblances of power is a recurrent strand in criticism of his work as (a) ‘poujadisme intellectuel’, as is rejection of his apparent anarchical nihilism, superficially similar to that most famous poujadist slogan – during the 1956 legislative elections – of ‘Sortez les sortants !’. Like the Poujadists, Yanne seemed to want destruction, without proposals for rebuilding. ¹² But satirical humour is not solely destructive, negative and nihilistic: it can hold hope for improvement.

As a contemporary analyst of 1950s France, Roland Barthes in ‘Quelques paroles de M. Poujade’ (1957b: 98) showed how the ‘logic’ of Poujadism as a petty-bourgeois mythology ‘implique le refus de l’altérité, la négation du différent, le bonheur de l’identité et l’exaltation du semblable’. But Yanne's humour often defends individualism against institutions or ideas which impose uniformity – the Church, political ideology, cultural fads, official history – and is thus in some ways the antithesis of a ‘poujadism of ideas’. Barthes also highlighted, however, the centrality of ‘common sense’ – typical of Yanne's ‘everyman’ perspectives – in Poujadism: ‘le réel petit-bourgeois […] a tout de même sa philosophie : c’est le “bon sens”, le fameux bon sens des “petites gens” (Barthes, 1957b: 97). Riutort (2001: 213) suggests in his study of Yanne's popular films of the 1970s and 1980s that his ‘dérision’ can also be analysed as a manifestation of Barthe's ‘critique Ni-Ni’ wherein a form of (petty bourgeois) ‘common sense’ criticises indiscriminately extremes of politics and culture. As Barthes describes it, ‘Ni-Ni’ is a ‘mécanique de la double exclusion’, effected through a ‘procédé terroriste’, which ultimately creates a ‘belle morale du Tiers-Parti’ (Barthes, 1957a: 163). This helps to explain how Yanne's ‘cruel’ satirical humour terrorised left and right with equal ease, and how Yanne's politics appeared hard to define. If we take ‘common sense’ to provide a moral standard against which authority or institutions can be judged, then Yanne as satirist – following the formulation of Marc Duval and Sophie Martinez (2000: 184) – employs a classic rhetorical mechanism: ‘pour rabaisser sa cible, il en déforme la représentation par le biais du comique et la condamne en s’appuyant sur une norme morale’.

A fruitful perspective on ‘poujadism’ as a term of political, social, cultural (and, importantly for music criticism, intellectual) invalidation (and how it can be applied so easily and widely) is offered by Annie Collovald (1991), who saw the epithet as a ‘mot de passe’. The term ‘poujadisme’ is more ‘évaluation’ than ‘dénotation’, used as ‘une accusation politique d’abord visant à stigmatiser les acteurs qu’elle désigne, en prévenant contre eux’, and is, in fine, ‘un condensateur de stigmates’ (Collovald, 1991: 97–98). This analysis demonstrates the extreme plasticity of the term-accusation ‘poujadiste’, used in reference to the politics of France in the mid-1950s, to discussion of Coluche's presidential candidacy in 1981, to Jean-Marie Le Pen's Front National, or for us, to Yanne, always operating within its own ‘double fonction circulaire’: to ‘produire un stéréotype social, et le constituant […] rendre intelligible et évidente l’indignité politique de ceux qu’il désigne’ (Collovald, 1991: 99). Building on what Yanne and those around him said about ‘poujadism’ and Barthe's perspectives, Collovald's insights applied to Yanne indicate that however much this ‘elastic’ insult (Collovald, 1991: 101) seems to fit, clear conclusions on precisely how far he was or was not ‘poujadist’ in his critically derisive humour will likely remain elusive.

Contrasting with the artistic invalidation operated on Yanne by critics from the (broad) intellectual left in French culture through the charge of ‘poujadisme’ – and Collovald (1991: 98–9) indicates how the term often reveals more about its users than its target – one analyst situated him… within the republicanism of… 1848. In the mid-1970s, controversial conservative writer Dominique de Roux saw Yanne as a critic of false standards: ‘Il y a du Péguy chez Jean Yanne et un sens de la propriété à la Montesquieu : un Français de 1848, mais pas du côté versaillais’ (De Roux, 1974: 69). It was the Second Republic of 1848 that introduced ‘Égalité’ to the devise républicaine, so Yanne's culturally demotic – for de Roux – popular satire was, paradoxically, an egalitarian revealing agent of failings of elite culture. In de Roux's peculiar La France de Jean Yanne – a polemic against conservative France's perceived surrender of traditional values – based in questionable fashion on interviews with its eponymous subject (Dicale, 2012: 289; Durieux, 2005: 241–2), Yanne perhaps unwisely contributed a preface. Here he explained more of his philosophy of life and humour, situating himself within the tradition of Molière, Céline, Artaud as well as humourists such as Pierre Dac, Courteline, and Allais, and suggesting that comedy is more useful than philosophy, unless ‘humoristes’ are actually themselves the only ‘vrais philosophes’. Making life bearable can be achieved through derision: ‘Le seul moyen de supporter la vie c’est […] de la prendre comme un jeu, d’en remarquer chaque jour les ridicules, les travers, les aspects dérisoires’ (De Roux, 1974:1–2).

Another useful approach to the politics of Yanne's humour is how it relates to anarchism, and specifically France's tradition of ‘anarchisme de droite’. ¹³ Better, perhaps, than poujadisme, this may reflect the more libertarian dimensions of his thinking underlying his occasional self-definition as a ‘poujadiste soixante-huitard’. Alain Faudemay (1999) has discussed the potential – literary, but Yanne is a lyricist – linkages between anarchism and humour, defining anarchism as ‘un scepticisme généralisé à l’égard des valeurs sociales’ (474), a formulation which reflects neatly Yanne's musical critiques of 1960s France. He identifies attitudes shared by anarchism and humour such as ‘cynisme froid’ and the macabre (Faudemay, 1999: 472), which likewise reflect Yanne's approaches to sensitive topics, and suggests – again in echo of Yanne's mistrust of convention and institutions – that ‘Aux racines communes de l’anarchisme et de l’humour, ce qui les fait jaillir en même temps, est-ce […] l’exaltation de l’individu ?’ (483). A more provocative but equally useful analysis of right-wing anarchism was provided by Pascal Ory in 1985, just as Yanne's block-buster films were taking ‘pouyannisme’ (Dicale, 2012: 259) to wider audiences. ¹⁴ Whereas Faudemay considers the personal politics of writers and their work within the framework of crossovers between humour and anarchism, Ory emphasises how anarchism of the right in creativity is a position of guilty submission to imperfect reality. Quoting the ‘conclusion’ of Yanne's film Moi y’en a vouloir des sous (1973) that the world is peopled by idiots fighting with morons to prop up an absurd society, Ory highlighted how derision is a key feature of right-wing anarchism's moralising tendencies, and how anarchists of the right are less supporters of anarchy as a political model than agents of ‘complaisance’ towards the ‘anarchy’ of society as it is. For Yanne – as a right-wing anarchist torn between a ‘penchant au moralisme’ and an ‘intime conviction de l’inutilité de tout’ (Ory, 1985: 220) – ‘anarchist/poujadist’ critiques of society are derisive, rather than comic or farcical. Ory's analysis seems to closely reflect Yanne's attitudes. Humour is a ‘gourmandise de vieux sceptiques et de jeunes modérés’; farce targets a ‘large public et sa jouissance’, but derision is characterised by ‘des fulgurances redoutables et redoutées, mais aussi dans l’ensemble, quelque chose de plus mesquin et d’enfermé’. Finally, derision ‘[…] tourne plus vite en rond. Nulle part on ne saisit mieux qu’en face d’elle combien l’anarchisme de droite est plus affaire de complaisance devant l’anarchie établie que de sympathie pour l’anarchisme théorique’. (Ory, 1985: 220).

In what follows we consider Yanne's musical satire, showing how his critical humour targeted many of the political, social and cultural transformations that France was negotiating during the Trente glorieuses.

Satire in song: Yanne's myriad targets

The subjects targeted by Yanne's ‘poujadist’ invective were varied. He covered ‘traditional’ fault-lines in the French polity around clericalism/anti-clericalism and militarism/anti-militarism as longstanding quarrels resurfaced within a socio-political context stressed by the return of traditional left-right conflict, the Cold war, and the Algerian conflict. In parallel to his satire of issues inherited from the Third Republic, Yanne addressed new tensions arising from ‘modernisation’ and sociocultural change, including sexuality, gender, class, work and youth culture. In what follows, where we principally consider the lyrics of Yanne's songs, it should not be forgotten that they were iconoclastic as much for their musicality as for their wording: Yanne's use of musical genres amounted to ‘autant de nouvelles formes de comique’ (Dubois, 2013: 46) as his skill with genre mash-ups provided additional discordant dimensions to his music. The songs that we discuss below are amongst the most well-known – and characteristic in their provocation – of Yanne's output in the 1950s and 1960s; the discography provided by Durieux (2005: 427–30; 433–34) lists some 33 individual titles written and interpreted by Yanne himself, and songs composed by Yanne were recorded during this period by a dozen or so other artists, including, notably, Philippe Clay, Line Renaud, and Ginette Garcin (whose Crésoxipropanédiol en capsule is also considered below). ¹⁵

Anticlericalism and antimilitarism

Two key songs here are La Complainte du P3 (Avec Maria), ¹⁶ and Le Mambo du légionnaire ¹⁷ (both initially performed by Yanne during the mid-1950s). In 1958, these songs featured on Yanne's first LP, shortly after his initial ‘single’ produced earlier the same year (Barclay). This contained La Gamberge (discussed below), La Légende orientale (pastiche ‘Orientalism’ about oil wealth), Conseils aux filles (sexual politics and Catholic morality) and La Gloriole about the French revolution (discussed below). The LP featured La Complainte du P3 (Avec Maria), and Le Mambo du légionnaire, plus Le Soufre et le bénitier (religious morality), as well as Histoire triste (a woman enters a convent after failing… to learn to play the piano).

Although arguably less disrespectful of Catholic sensibilities than songs by Yanne in the 1960s such as Mon cher Albert (1964, discussed later), Avec Maria shocked both by its lyrics and use of the music of religious ceremony in the form of the ‘Ave Maria’ canticle. Sardonically described by Yanne as his modest contribution to reconciliation between Church and state, the song in live performance could be met with whistles of protest. As an early example of Yanne's ‘chanson humanitaire et sociale’, Avec Maria combines anticlericalism with reference to the plight of France's new industrial working classes, favoured by new social security provisions offered in the post-war social compromise, but increasingly caught in long working hours. For the ‘P3’ Citroën employee – a skilled worker – in Avec Maria, life revolves around weekend dancing with his girlfriend, not only on Saturdays, but also Sundays, notwithstanding that Maria's brother is a worker-priest in the RATP. The couple will marry as soon as the next strike at Citroën increases wages, and Maria is already pregnant. Combined with various sexual wordplays and the musically and morally jarring java version of Gounod's Ave Maria, the song implied that Catholicism held little interest for contemporary French society, where a worker ‘avec cantine et avantages sociaux’ and the opportunity to ‘danser le java’ is… ’heureux comme un roi’. The song's conclusion – focusing on Mossuz-Lavau's theme of ‘sex for pleasure’ – implies sardonically that the forthcoming child to be named Irénée (‘peace’) is just one aspect of lives centred on enjoyment of sex, material advantages (and work) rather than religion:

Ainsi un enfant va naître

Qu’on appellera Irénée

Irénée le divin enfant

Et le soir sans un mot

Autour du berceau

Avec Maria on ira danser le tango.

(La Complainte du P3 (Avec Maria), J. Yanne and J. Baïtzouroff, 1958, Barclay)

As well as derision targeting the Church, Avec Maria was also a genre satire of the chanson réaliste popularised – from the late nineteenth century to the interwar period – by artists such as Fréhel, Damia or Piaf. Charpentreau and Charpentreau (1960: 144) describe it as satire of chanson sociale and chanson à thèse: ‘un anti-Brel, si l’on veut’. Yanne's other pastiches of chanson réaliste's depictions of miserable social conditions included, for example, Donnez-moi de l’absinthe (1959).

In Le Soufre et le bénitier (1958) Yanne's target was similarly religion and its inability to provide answers to contemporary problems, an anti-clerical sentiment encapsulated in the song's chorus:

Car que l’on tombe dans le gouffre

Ou que l’on soit au ciel jugé

On risque bien des deux côtés

D’être brûlé par le feu

Ou noyé dans le bénitier

(Le Soufre et le bénitier, J. Yanne, 1958, Barclay)

Yanne's live performances of Le Soufre et le bénitier were usually prefaced by a lengthy parody of a Bossuet sermon, leading to a satirical character assassination of Pope Pius XII, whom he accused of lending his papal image to detergent advertising with the punning slogan ‘Le pape fait des bulles grâce à Persavon’. ¹⁸

Another major target for Yanne was the Army. The song Le Mambo du Légionnaire (1958) met similar opposition to Avec Maria in live performance, notably at a concert in Nîmes in 1958 when Foreign légionnaires in the audience rushed the stage. In the charged context of late-1950s France, with troops engaged in the dirty war subduing the armed independence movement in Algeria, the Army and its role in politics and France's ‘colonising mission’ in general – of which the Légion was a key element – were vexed subjects, and Yanne's satire of a theme interpreted more positively by Piaf in the 1930s (Mon Légionnaire) was corrosively provocative. ¹⁹ It is as much the lyrics of the song – dedicated sardonically to Dr Schweitzer – that poke fun, as the genre mash-up of ‘oriental’ music, 1950s chanson and toccata and tenor of Yanne's delivery. In pastiche of conventional imagery a Foreign légionnaire ‘énigmatiquement beau’ played his favourite toccata on a piano ‘systématiquement faux’, accompanied by the sensual dancing of a native girl. Rather than assuaging his ‘tourments’, however, this could never contradict what was in fact the harsh reality of colonial life:

Des chameliers qui passaient, les cheveux se hérissaient

Car devant eux se dressaient des mirages et qui plus

Est, ce qui prouvait que lorsqu’on ne pouvait plus

Marcher si l’on avait mal aux pieds, on en crevait.

(Le Mambo du Légionnaire, J. Yanne, 1958, Barclay)

Underlying his attacks on these relatively stereotypical targets for criticism was Yanne's personal perspective on life, his artistic predilection for satire and irony, and dislike of pretence and vanity. A key song here is the early number La Gamberge (1958), ²⁰ composed and written by Yanne initially for actor-singer Philippe Clay but which became successful for Yanne himself. In La Gamberge, Yanne explains how youth is wasted in vain hopes of traveling the world, tilting at windmills like Don Quixote, righting imagined wrongs and idly daydreaming of power. Despite dreaming of being a hero, turning every ‘guenille’ into an ‘étendard’ and wanting to ‘faire le miriflore’, experience ‘la faune et la flore’ and ‘faire une arche de [s]on bateau’, the song's hero realises – too late – that:

Je regardais trop ce qui brille

Car de ces folies de jeunesse,

De tous ces désirs insensés,

A petit feu j’ai gaspillé

Mes vingt ans, toute ma richesse

(La Gamberge, Yanne, 1958, Barclay)

Yanne also engaged with the younger generations’ difficulties of adapting to society and culture torn between forced modernisation and the past in another noted song – Du pain aux oiseaux (1957) – which dealt, specifically, with a young man's refusal of military service.

Politics and society

Also in 1958, as France transitioned traumatically to the Fifth Republic, Yanne's La Gloriole ²¹ poked sardonic fun at her original change of régime effected by the Revolution of 1789, suggesting that violent changes of political systems may destroy fundamental aspects of national identity. As the Fourth Republic ‘mal-aimée’ collapsed, with government failing under the combined pressures of war in Algeria and political instability in Paris, La Gloriole interpreted the history of France's glorious republican past in the light of a contemporary shift from a weak but democratic regime to one promising greater executive strength at the price of feared autocratic government by de Gaulle, saviour of France in 1945, but possibly a ‘monarque périmé’ for the 1960s:

Au pays de la révolte

Le peuple était ulcéré

Des détours et virevoltes

D’un monarque périmé

[…]

Dansons la carmagnole

Car au son du clairon

A se casser la gueule

Est morte… une nation !

(La Gloriole, J. Yanne, 1958, Barclay)

By 1960 and 1961 however, Yanne's satirical analysis of French society was focusing more on the mental and physical state of the body politic. In Psychose ²² (1960) he portrayed the irrational fears and hallucinations of someone having viewed Hitchcock's Psycho (1960) in terms reflecting misgivings in France about political developments. Although in the early 1960s France's most significant twentieth-century psychosis – the ‘Vichy Syndrome’ (Rousso, 1987) – was arguably in some remission, French national consciousness was nevertheless repressing tensions about wartime collaboration, and the behaviour of military and politicians during the Algerian crisis. Yanne's imagery of wardrobes filled with corpses clearly references repressed trauma, partnered by the metaphor – in anticipation of France's growing concerns over cultural Americanisation – of ‘itsy-bitsy [polka-dot?] bikinis’:

Dans la baignoire il y a du sang

Des masques noirs des monstres grimaçants

Et sur les murs courent des rats

Des araignées, des cancres, là

Il y a des cadavres plein la penderie

Et des squelettes en itsy bikinis

Et tout à coup une tête de mort

Vous attrape l’oreille et vous mord

(Psychose, J. Yanne and J. Baïtzouroff, 1960, Mercury)

Similarly, Je n'suis pas bien portant ²³ (Koger et al., 1961) catalogued the multiple ailments suffered by someone who although wishing better health, finds themselves always ill. Parallels with the contemporary state of France were obvious: although the new Constitution of 1958 and Gaullist administration were administering a tonic, the nation's medical condition was effectively ‘patraque’ (ongoing Algerian conflict and terrorism in mainland France were creating a ‘mauvais sang fou’) and society was suffering ‘de tous les côtés’.

In 1966, Yanne's song Crésoxipropanédiol en capsule ²⁴ interpreted by Ginette Garcin addressed issues of personal and societal depression, and the – ultimately futile – remedy of prescription drugs. When ‘ça va mal’, ‘je n’ai pas le moral’, ‘je sens mes nerfs qui craquent’ or ‘je suis patraque’, the singer suggests, it is easy to reach for panaceas. As French society moved through the ‘ennui’ (Viansson-Ponté, 1968) creating the conditions for the explosion of discontent that was Mai ‘68, Yanne lampooned the mood-improving drugs of big pharma and suggested that if traditional ‘vieux remèdes de bonne femme’ were ineffective, a near placebo treatment of aspirin tablets and a lump of sugar would do as much or as little good. In Barthesian ‘Ni-Ni’ terms, tradition and modernity were thus both rejected:

Rien ne vaut je le proclame

Les vieux remèdes de bonne femme

Mon grand-père d’un geste fier

En sortait de sa tabatière

Papa qui était estafette

En avait dans sa musette

(Crésoxipropanédiol en capsule, J. Yanne and J. Baïtzouroff, 1966, Editions Riviera)

Youth and popular culture

More self-referentially, Yanne authored and performed songs in the early 1960s which combined comment on society and politics, with – more culturally – his profession as entertainer and the development of popular music in France. The object of Yanne's commentary was principally rock music and its challenge to traditional genres of popular music, and, indeed, to new forms of Americanised French music typified by ‘yé-yé’. In Le Rock coco (1961), ²⁵ J’aime pas le rock (1961) ²⁶ and Saint-Rock (1961) ²⁷ Yanne developed – with varying elaboration and lyrical complexity – a sardonic critique of France's enthusiasm for US-inspired musics. Whereas in Le Rock coco the principal gag of the song – in joyous rock melodies – is the passion of Coco the monkey for rock played as loudly as possible (because… ’Coco aime le roque-fort’), in J’aime pas le rock, a range of negative reactions to rock are developed by the aggressively nasal musical reactionary Yanne, with backing girls who nevertheless laud rock's qualities (‘formidable’, ‘impeccable’, ‘remarquable’, ‘appréciable’, ‘admirable’, ‘délectable’, ‘estimable’):

Il n’aime pas le rock

Ah non ca me dégoute le rock

Alors hein j’aime pas ça alors

Il n’aime pas le rock

Oh moi j’aime que la danse viennoise de toute façon alors

Il n’aime pas le rock

Oh le rock ça me fait alors ça me fait un drôle d’effet

Il n’aime pas le rock.

Et pis dans l’rock y’a pas d’cor de chasse

Et moi j’aime que ça le cor de chasse alors.

Oh non, ah le rock oh quelle horreur alors !

Ah mais arrêtez-le ce rock…

(J'aime pas le rock, J. Yanne and J. Baïtzouroff, 1961, Mercury)

These attitudes around rock music encapsulated cultural divides between generations in early 1960s France typified by growing tension between young people born during the post-1945 ‘baby boom’ into an increasingly consumerist and Americanised society and older generations. As French ‘youth’ developed as concept and as sociocultural force, youth cultures such as music became sites of conflict which ultimately found partial expression in May ‘68. Yanne's tongue-in-cheek inventory of negative and positive views on rock in J’aime pas le rock arguably prefigured Serge Gainsbourg's insidiously satirical mockery of cultural chasms between young and old in France perpetrated by his song Annie aime les sucettes which – performed by France Gall – won Eurovision for France in 1966. ²⁸

In Saint-Rock however, satirical messages about youth, culture and identity left no doubt as to the song's subversive intent. In another melodic and lyrical pastiche of the Marseillaise, Yanne equates love of rock music with national pride and patriotism, suggesting – in an inversion of usual tropes – that for younger French citizens, rock and its accompanying sub-cultural forms and values such as ‘blousons noirs’ and ‘pick-ups’ are more significant than the traditional values embodied by France's national anthem. Thus ‘Le rock est l’hymne de notre époque’ and ‘les camarades’ are tired of the ‘sérénades’ produced by the ‘sinistres croulants’ (musicians and politicians?) since the war.

Allons enfants de la Patrie

Le jour du rock est arrivé

Avec nous de la mélodie

Le tempo minable est changé

[…]

Dansons dansons

Et que le rock

Abreuve nos micro-sillons

(Saint-Rock, J. Yanne and J. Baïtzouroff, 1961, Mercury)

Yanne's commentary on rock as a cultural form also came through collaborations. During the early 1960s, he worked with Jean-Pierre Kalfon (1946–2020) then known as Hector, leader and vocalist of the provocative rock-combo Hector and Les Mediators (Chalvidant and Mouvet, 2001: 106). The film Cherchez l’Idole (1963) ²⁹ shows Hector and Les Mediators live on-stage at the Olympia performing Je vous déteste (lyrics by Yanne and Gérard Sire; music by Yanne and ‘Popoff’), ³⁰ and indicates how Yanne and Kalfon's music was very different to the anodine usages of ‘yé-yé’. The on-stage violence (gratuitous destruction of musical instruments) and outrageous appearance of this ‘Chopin du Twist’ (Hector regularly wore top-hats, coat-tails, cape and white gloves, with long hair and a bath-plug necklace) prefigured later performance styles such as punk. The surreal on-stage antics (moving around set in coffins, a bath, or sedan chair) were a culturally-subversive provocation attractive to Yanne, who with Sire provided both Je vous déteste ³¹ and (Fous le camp) T’es pas du quartier ³² for the group's second EP (Philips, 1963). Hector's on-stage destructiveness and cultural iconoclasm were supported by the nihilism of Yanne and Sire's lyrics, and Yanne subsequently made Je vous déteste his own. Compared with the saccharine wording and content of much contemporary chanson, the repetition of ‘je vous hais’, ‘je vous balaie’, ‘je vous méprise’, ‘je vous emmerde’ and other insults was strikingly discordant, and the song concluded in the same vein:

Ah ! Ah ! Que je vous hais

J’vous méprise, moi

J’vous emmerde

J’veux plus vous voir

Bande de minables

Je préfère partir parce que sinon je vais vous dire des choses méchantes

Bande de minus

Ah ! Je vous hais !

(Je vous déteste, J. Yanne, J. Baïtzouroff and G. Sire, 1963, Philips)

Expressing such nihilism and negativity in the France of the early 1960s, where discourses of ‘progress’ and ‘growth’ were the rhetorical backdrop to the new Fifth Republic was counter to the – official, at least – spirit of the age, and the misanthropy and sociopathy of Yanne's lyrics both echoed a growing general malaise within French society and reflected his and Hector's challenging of the music ‘business’ itself. ³³

Sexuality and gender

Yanne's lyrics and music for Hector and others formed only part of his frenetic activity. In the mid-1960s his music seems to have increasingly focused on sociopolitical issues, often in sketches and songs for the famously short-lived satirical television comedy series 1 = 3 (1964) co-presented with Jacques Martin. ³⁴ The strange title of this programme reflects Martin and Yanne's appreciation of the provocatively absurd in humour and was based on a well-known popular physics book of the early 1900s that demonstrated plausibly logical explanations for unsettling facts, such as ‘one equals three’ (Dubois, 2013: 49). Such a perspective can be seen to durably underpin Yanne's work of destabilisation of convention, conformism and accepted truths of both left and right. Several songs recorded in the mid-1960s illustrate Yanne's targets during these middle years of the Gaullist decade. Most significant are Camille (1965), ³⁵ Rouvrez les Maisons (1965) ³⁶ and Mon cher Albert (1964) ³⁷ which discuss gender and sexuality (in conjunction with religion, in the case of Mon cher Albert). Also noteworthy are Le pauvre Blanc (1965) ³⁸ and Les Revendications d’Albert (1966), ³⁹ which deal with more social and political issues. Sociopolitically and socioculturally, France in the mid-1960s was in flux, and the politics of sexuality was arguably a central theme in this. Janine Mossuz-Lavau (1993) has summarised changes from the 1950s and 1960s onwards as dominated by moves to consider ‘sex for pleasure not only conceiving children’, to ‘eliminate taboos around the sexuality of young people’, to end sexual violence, and to ‘allow freedom for all sexual orientations’. Yanne's songs addressed these tensions.

Camille (1965) discusses a man's relationship with a blow-up doll. As someone who has – shockingly for contemporary sexual politics – ‘connu des tas de filles, des tas de garçons aussi’ the narrator-singer explains the ‘trouble dans ma vie’ he feels after meeting Camille, who is ‘pas très fille […] pas très garçon non plus’. Although ‘certains trouveraient atroce / son corps cave un peu partout’ the song ends by explaining the pleasures of this relationship:

Chaque nuit avec Camille

Je m’envole vers les cieux

Je suffoque et m’écarquille

Je plane, je suis heureux

C’est vraiment l’apothéose

Des voluptés de l’amour

Mais la meilleure des choses

Ne peut pas durer toujours!

(Camille, J. Yanne, 1965, Barclay)

Whereas Camille shocked merely by its subject matter in the Catholic country that France still remained, despite the cultural changes effected by post-1945 demographics and modernisation, the lyrics of Rouvrez les Maisons (1965) made explicit links with contemporary – sociocultural – politics. It called – provocatively – for the recognition of the regulated bordellos which (despite a law passed in 1946) had continued to exist in France until they were eventually outlawed in 1960, ⁴⁰ lampooning France's European integration and sardonically suggesting that the sex industry was a French speciality, to the extent – in shocking lack of deference to the office of the head of state – that in President de Gaulle's home village of Colombey-les-deux-Eglises a third ‘church’ was in fact the brothel. The finale of the song called on the President to re-open brothels to aid the Common market and tourism to France:

Puisqu’il faut construire l’Europe,

Et des pays faire l’union

Il faudra bien qu’on développe

Le tourisme dans la nation

Ah que celui qui nous dirige

Agisse donc avec raison

Car le Marché commun l’oblige

A faire rouvrir les maisons !!!!

(Rouvrez les maisons, J. Yanne and J. Baïtzouroff, Barclay, 1965)

In Mon cher Albert (1964) Yanne returned to the theme of the Catholic church but added his own inimitable commentary on homosexual couples in the priesthood. Describing the physical and emotional relationship between two gay priests in terms of the passion of ‘amours romantiques qu’on découvre à trente ans’, the lyrics reveal how Albert's body ‘fait vibrer’ his partner, and how Albert does ‘des choses aphrodisiaques’ including – in a sardonic swipe at perceived reactionary Catholic high-culture – reading Mauriac to him, ‘tout nu dans la cuisine’. One last thing Albert's lover asks of him takes the traditional symbol of the priesthood – the black cassock – and presents it as an erotic fetish:

Je vais pourtant encore te demander

Une dernière grâce, pour mieux me contenter

Lorsque tu viens m’aimer, garde donc ta soutane

Mon cher Albert

Mon cher Albert

(Mon cher Albert, J. Yanne and Popoff, 1964, Barclay)

In Le pauvre Blanc (1965) Yanne deals with another pressing concern of mid-1960s France: immigration, and resentment felt by elements of the working classes when jobs seemed to be taken by first- and second-generation immigrants. Not content with addressing the delicate topic of racial tension, or perhaps as a way of camouflaging this new issue of social discord behind more traditionally anticlerical polemics, Le pauvre Blanc mixes the evocation of the newfound alienation of poor white workers with an appeal to God to give them the musical rhythm (‘la musique à contretemps’) necessary for expressing their anomie in a… ’blanco spirituel’. The music of Le pauvre Blanc matched its jarring lyrics, as Yanne genre-switched between gospel and rhythm and blues. Taking the music of black suffering – gospel – and using it to express how ‘autrefois le blanc était heureux / dans son usine’ and ‘dans son deux-pièces cuisine’, working at Renault's Billancourt car production facility and singing ‘des chansons de Delmet’, the lyrics satirised both the complacent attitudes of France's economic prosperity (‘autrefois…’) and cultural homogeneity (songs by Paul Delmet – 1862–04 – were staples of the café-concert vogue in the 1890s):

- Oh Seigneur -

Vous qui êtes plein d’amour

Le pauvre blanc sait qu’un jour

Enfin vous aurez pitié

Et que vous lui accorderez

Le tempo tant désiré

Pour qu’il puisse vous louer

Et chanter un éternel

BLANCO SPIRITUUUUUUUUEL

(Le pauvre Blanc, J. Yanne and J. Baïtzouroff, 1965, Barclay)

Yanne's ‘blithe dalliance’ of satire and irony

Katherine Turner has reflected on irony in popular music and its intersections with politics, culture and society (Turner, 2020) and in a formulation which encapsulates the complexity of Yanne's musical corpus, she suggests that irony is simultaneously ‘a blithe dalliance’ and symbolic of its time and context. In ‘sonic space’ irony ‘defines contemporary issues, reframes the best and worst of our politics, and highlights what makes us angry, what makes us laugh and the contradictory nature of the human spirit’ (Turner, 2020: 1). We hope to have shown how Yanne's satirical lyrics and music reflected France in the late 1950s and 1960s, contributing through irony and irreverence to defining contentious issues of politics, culture and society, and how Yanne's ‘contradictory’ self-presentation of the motivations for his irony and satire as hybrid of left and right reflect the complexities of his creative spirit. In terms of the reception of his work as ‘poujadism’ this can be seen as a ‘mot de passe’ of disqualification anchored ambivalently to the themes, content and style of Yanne's humour, but ignoring his averred intentions to use humour to make life more liveable.

Understanding Yanne's work better helps to frame the varying reactions that arose on his death in 2003. Obituaries mainly celebrated his acting, but also touched on the humour of his films, sketches and music. Some commentators saw Yanne's comedy as an expression of his personal politics and mindset: President Chirac noted Yanne's ‘humour singulier’ and ‘personnalité généreuse’ and Culture minister Jean-Jacques Aillagon emphasised ‘l’humour noir et grinçant’ and ‘regard caustique’ of a ‘personnage hors du commun’ (Nouvel observateur, 2003). Others, such as in L’Humanité, focused only on his acting and ignored his music and sketches, but suggested that his published witticisms and jokes represented ‘un humour très français dont il était l’incarnation’. This was a humour which was ‘tendre, bourru, caustique […]’ from a comedian who ‘adorait l’humour à froid’ and was ‘[a]ussi désabusé que pince sans rire’, […]. But ‘derrière la dérision […] on sentait de la tendresse […] On gardera de lui l’image de l’humoriste populaire et gouailleur […]’ (H., 2003). ⁴¹ Le Point emphasised Yanne's role as a revealing agent: ‘Le rire de Jean Yanne avait des vertus démystificatrices. Il déconstruisait les légendes, les mettait à nu.’ (Le Fol, 2016). Libération was more interested than other newspapers: commentators variously celebrated the career of the ‘Français moyen préféré des Français’ and his work (‘Subversif, subversif, vous avez dit subversif …?’) of contestation (Berthelot, 2003) or revisited the familiar charges of ‘poujadisme aigre-doux’ (Potel, 2004). Antoine de Baecque was one of the few who mentioned his musical satire: ‘Son titre phare dit assez justement le registre comique de Jean Yanne : Je vous déteste, ah, ce que je vous hais…’ and characterised his humour as ‘farce qui dézingue à tout va’ with a penchant for ‘anathème politique’ that made his reputation for ‘poujadisme intello’ and being an ‘anar de droite’. De Baecque quoted Yanne's own defense of his ‘style’: ‘Des idées de gauche avec des mots de droite, et une figure de crétin pathologique’ (De Baecque, 2003). Somewhat pointedly Le Monde republished Jean-Louis André's ‘billet’ of 1989 considering Yanne's – short-lived – Tout le monde il est gentil ‘candid camera’ television series on La Cinq. ⁴² While recognising Yanne's ‘cynisme’ and ‘talent’, entitled ‘Jean Yanne est-il méchant ?’ the article left little doubt as to its author's view, echoing Vaillant's comment discussed above (2021: 127) that the best comedians of the post war cabarets exploited cynicism and ‘méchanceté’. Thus Yanne was seen principally through the lens of poujadism/anarchism or as the author of a kind of humour of cruelty.

We can initially conclude with a – positive – personal perspective on Yanne's humour, from life-long colleague and friend Philippe Bouvard. For him, Yanne was, like all great comics, someone without hope ‘ne croyant plus en rien ni en personne, tout en demeurant persuadé que le rire qui lave les pires vilénies et régénère les âmes meurtries constitue une espèce de communion entre celui qui l’administre et celui qui s’y adonne. (Bouvard, 2005: 7). But the final word should come from the ‘Français moyen préféré des Français’ himself. In his 1973 interview with Claude Sarraute (Sarraute, 1973), Yanne played with how he should be located politically, flirting ambiguously with labels such as ‘right’, ‘left’, ‘anarchist’ and ‘fascist’. But here he also gave perhaps the best summary of the ultimate purpose of his derisive humour in music, sketches and films: ‘La seule violence qui puisse se justifier c’est celle que l’on emploie pour défendre les opprimés.’ In the contemporary world where ‘free speech’ and ‘cancel-culture’ are increasingly in question, and issues of what can and cannot be said in jest or in truth arise daily, the complex question of whether it can be ‘interdit d’interdire’ is surely very relevant.