At the controls of a team ready to face Father Fourras this Saturday August 13, 2022 in “Fort Boyard”, Jean-Luc Lemoine is now a known and recognized host and comedian. But this has not always been the case. At the beginning of his career, his future worried his parents very much.
Whether as a comedian, actor, TV or radio host or even as a columnist on the program “Touche pas à mon poste”, Jean-Luc Lemoine is now considered a figure in the French audiovisual landscape. But while he celebrated his 52nd birthday in 2022, the latter has not always had the success that we know today.
Video. Jean-Luc Lemoine: why his parents waited ten years before going to see him on stage
A stalled career in its early days
Like many young aspiring actors and comedians, Jean-Luc Lemoine had a half-hearted start, dotted with a few successes that made him want to continue on this path, while encountering enough difficulties not to earn a good living. . As a result, in the mid-1990s, his parents decided to give him an ultimatum: “I was not taxable, I was the despair of my parents and they asked me to pass an administrative competition which I passed to please them and that unfortunately I succeeded. I found myself overnight director of a leisure center in the city of Paris”, he told the antenna of France Info, in the show “Everything and its opposite”. It must be said that his parents did not really believe in his success, as he confided to the podcast Parents d’abord de Télé-Loisirs: “When I started doing this job, my parents were more like telling me: ‘You’re wasting your time, you’ll never get there’, rather than encouraging me. It’s complicated when you start something and you feel like you’re the only one who believes in it. “
He also remembers a particularly humiliating anecdote: “It’s always my mother who has the best punchlines. I remember that one day I was going to the market with her and my sister. She ran into someone one who says to her: ‘What are your children doing?’ She replies: ‘My daughter is an English teacher. And him, nothing…’. It was completely abstract for them. I think it was something beyond them. They took 10 years to come see me on stage. For the first 10 years, I really did that in my corner without them coming. This job became concrete for them when I joined Laurent Ruquier’s team. Suddenly, there was media visibility.“
The comedian does not hide it: “Before making Laurent Ruquier, I was non-taxable for ten years. Comedians are not only lazy, they are also unemployed. I sometimes played in front of three people, including two that I knew. But that’s the reality of comedians. We learn and we know if we’re there for the right reasons. Live performance is an exchange.”
His rant against criticism of intermittent workers
Today, Jean-Luc Lemoine is one of the “lucky” in his profession, those who manage to live from their work. But he also experienced moments of doubt, as he confided a few years ago to Closer: “When you have worked for ten years without living financially, you tell yourself that it is still a job. very fragile.” He made the decision very early on to fight to move forward: “I am very rational and rational, quite a “control freak”. I need to reassure myself. The only thing that allows me to survive in this , is to go all the way. I’m a hard worker. I roll up my sleeves, because if, at some point, it has to stop, I don’t want to tell myself that I haven’t worked hard enough .”
But if there’s one thing he no longer tolerates, it’s criticism of the regime of intermittent entertainment workers, often accused of laziness by people who don’t know much about it: “We always put intermittent workers for profiting from the system, but the reality is that most do not reach the number of hours to benefit from the system.”
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See also: Jean-Luc Lemoine: Back to the comedian’s past
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