In Quebec, if you are trying to silence someone, to exclude them from good society, all you have to do is call them XX-phobe or XX-ist.

It puts an end to the debate, it is a condemnation to silence, to cancellation.

Le Devoir wrote that on stage, Guy Nantel “holds a sadly racist, homophobic, transphobic, sexist, classist and ageist discourse”.

These are serious charges.

We knew that Le Devoir had become a den of little woke priests, but that a show critic is unable to see the second degree in a comedy show, it's the end of the end.

His wife is not dead

Along with 1499 other people, I attended the premiere of the show last Tuesday If I understood you correctly, you are saying...

Guy Nantel specifies from the outset that he is going to put on an “equal” show, because he will despise everyone equally. As much the young morons as the old idiots, the polluters as the ecologists, the PQ as the solidarity and the conservatives, those who imposed the sanitary measures and those who challenged them. And the person he laughs at the most... is him! He comes back with a lot of humor on his failed attempt to become leader of the PQ.

The slobbering character played by Nantel speaks enormities for an hour and a half: he even goes so far as to affirm that six billion people must be eliminated from the surface of the Earth. Even a six-year-old child is able to understand that Nantel is not a bloodthirsty eugenicist!

In the show, Guy claims his wife is dead. It's a fiction! She was sitting in front of me in the room.

Le Devoir calls Nantel a “classist” (discrimination according to social class) because he contemptuously asserts that the other aspirants to the leadership have parked their Kia next to his Porsche. It's a fiction! Guy Nantel does not drive a Porsche, but a Prius C (Toyota's most economical hybrid) which dates from 2017.

You may be thinking that I have a conflict of interest. Guy is a columnist on my QUB radio show every day. We are colleagues on the show Le monde à l’envers on TVA. And Guy is a close friend with whom I regularly share dinners (he cooks an excellent spaghetti with pesto).

But even people who are the opposite of Nantel loved his show.

In the comedian's dressing room, after the show, I saw Anne Casabonne, from the PCQ. She came to congratulate Nantel for having made him laugh out loud when he had just ridiculed the anti-vaccines...

Casabonne is capable of understanding the second degree.

Can you commit him to Duty?

Forced laugh

Nantel practices political and societal humor. He takes a magnifying glass to exaggerate and caricature situations. But in the end, it makes us reflect: on our environmental contradictions, our indifference to old people, etc.

But what Nantel wants us to think about the most is our indecision as a people, our inability to give ourselves a country.

Nantel is not "embittered" or "bitter" to have lost the leadership of the PQ. He is disappointed that, as a people, we did not choose to become “masters in our own house”.

And that's not funny.