Alexis Patri 2:00 p.m., April 09, 2022

In 50 years of career, the comedian, actor and comedian director Michel Boujenah has established himself in the French landscape of humor.

But how did he choose this career?

This is what he explains on Saturday at the microphone of Isabelle Morizet in the program "There is not only one life in life". 

INTERVIEW

Despite herself, she pushed Michel Boujenah towards theater and humor.

Tata Ginette, a friend of the actor's father, gave him a taste for storytelling and exaggeration from childhood.

The comedian paints Saturday in 

There is not just one life in life 

the portrait of this woman who mattered to him, while explaining to Isabelle Morizet's microphone how he gradually oriented himself towards the comedy career that he has been leading at a beating pace for 50 years.

“What was fascinating with Tata Ginette is that she was both very beautiful with her green eyes and that she told sex stories!” recalls Michel Boujenah.

>> Find Isabelle Morizet's shows every weekend from 1 p.m. to 2 p.m. on Europe 1 as well as in podcast and replay here

Tata Ginette, funny until her last breath

"For me, she's a cousin of Sophia Loren. Like her, she had this popular side of her first films while being stunningly beautiful", he continues, before telling the humor that this Tata Ginette kept until his death at age 96.

"At the end of her life, she explained to her daughter that she had quit smoking. Since when? Since yesterday. Why? Because I learned that you could die while smoking!", He bursts out laughing.

“I hurt everywhere, except in the right place!”, regularly declared the old lady.

"She never stopped making people laugh. And she called me from time to time to tell me a funny story. She told them in a sublime way", explains Michel Boujenah with admiration.

"Presumably, yes, she is one of the people who gave me a taste for storytelling and making people laugh. That's for sure."

"Doing theater was essential to my emotional survival"

His oratorical talent, the actor discovers it in high school, when he gives a very personal presentation to the class on the book

The Last of the Righteous

.

"I discovered that when I told stories, I was a little useful to others, that I gave them pleasure", specifies the actor.

"It was not a light pleasure, it was something strong. And I was moved by that. But I did not know that I was going to make it my job."

>> LISTEN ALSO - 

 The day Michel Boujenah ran naked at Place de la Concorde

Because, family of doctors obliges, Michel Boujenah is registered with the faculty of medicine.

He will attend classes there for three days, then decides to speak to his father.

"I told him that I couldn't do medicine, that maybe I was doing a huge bullshit in my life, but that I was going to do theater," he recalls.

"I had to do theatre, it was essential to my emotional survival. It's like when you love: you tell yourself that you would die without this person. It happens to everyone, at least once in their life , to experience this kind of emotion."

50 years later, Michel Boujenah does not regret his decision.

Even if he sometimes wonders what his life as a doctor would have been like.

“Today, when I see my doctor cousins, my doctor brother, sometimes I think it might have been good. Finally, I would have worked during the week, I would have had my weekend, I would have saved lives, I would have done good”, he imagines, before concluding with a joke of which he has the secret.

"Maybe I would have even made my patients laugh too. But, in the end, you are all my patients. You are all crazy, I know!"