Delivered. In a short video posted in September 2021 on her Twitter account, Charline Vanhoenacker suggested to internet users a ” small game “ : add the letters O and B behind the Z of the posters of the future candidate Eric Zemmour. Suiting the action to the word, she judged that it was « plus original » than draw him a mustache. In April 2017, a few weeks before the first round of the presidential election, she cried: “Give back the money, Francois!” » in front of François Fillon, guest of France Inter. And during the premiere of “L’Emission politique”, on France 2, in September 2016, she deposited, before starting her ticket, a saucepan under Nicolas Sarkozy’s nose. So many gestures that this Belgian satirical journalist considers “healthy”. It’s been nearly eight years since the morning columnist and host of the show “Par Jupiter! on public radio practices political humor.
In an essay that can be read with relish, the one that has put a very large number of elected officials to the joke test offers a “little manifesto of intellectual self-defense” in favor of political laughter. Punctuating her analysis with excerpts from her humorous posts, the secrets of which she reveals – but also the reaction of those concerned (where we learn that the only politician to have caused a scandal when he left the France Inter studio was Richard Ferrand , President of the National Assembly) –, Charline Vanhoenacker attributes to laughter the role of “social lubricant” in the face of the tensions and tragedies that are shaking the world. “Democratic Health Barometer”, “defense mechanism which has no other claim than to do good, to relieve”political humor has, she insists, a principle, that “to symbolically reverse the relationship of domination”. Its two minutes of“free humor” that she practices every morning on France Inter give her “the feeling of bringing a minister or a big boss back to [son] equal, and therefore equal to the listener, to the citizen”.
Righteousness and malice
Whereas it is “one of the most telling mirrors of society”, humor is “understudied and underquestioned”, notes the columnist. Researchers in the field (Nelly Quemener, Laure Flandrin, Julie Dufort, Lawrence Olivier, etc.) can be counted on the fingers of one hand. She has read them all and convenes them wisely. Dodging no controversy – academician Alain Finkielkraut accusing comedians of being “arms armed with well-meaning”, recurring criticism of a laugh that would have become « militant », even “Islamo-leftist” on public radio – Charline Vanhoenacker recalls some forgotten rules of the virtues of humor and responds, with accuracy and mischief, to attacks.
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