Dave Richer, brave? The actor grimaces. “That word, I’m not capable,” replies with a smile the one who is about to present his first comedy show, Spasme de rire. “I’m not brave, I’m not a superhero. I’m just an ordinary guy, with a little more rough experience, who never stopped thinking that he belonged, like everyone else. »
Just a regular guy? His desire not to be viewed with that disbelief one reserves for the slightest accomplishment of a disabled person, however understandable, should not distract us from the truth: Dave Richer – his trajectory at least – n nothing ordinary.
Rare are the actors, even less those with disabilities, who have so marked the imagination of Quebec couch potatoes in a single scene, which brought him together in the series Jasmine (1996) with Marie-Soleil Tougas as a benevolent prostitute. A carnal moment of vibrant authenticity, rarely produced on the small screen, which then marked a turning point in the representation of the sexuality of the disabled.
“The world still talks to me about it almost every day,” says the man who is delighted to still occupy such a place in people’s hearts, but who finds it hard to understand why his supposed courage is celebrated more than his performance. ‘actor. “It’s like having a hard time acknowledging that an actor with a disability can be handsome or good. »
Despite a track record of some 30 roles since the late 1990s, Dave Richer has kept a low profile, on TV and on stage, over the past 12 years, largely due to boccia. This disabled sport, which he learned about thanks to his girlfriend, a national team physiotherapist, enabled him to win a bronze medal at the Parapan American Games in Mexico in 2011 and to participate in the Paralympic Games in London in 2012.
“I left aside the game and the humor, but during the pandemic, it became clear to me that I had to return to my first loves”, explains the one for whom the threshold of fifty, that he crossed last June, will also have been the occasion for the assessments.
“Do you think the world is ready for this kind of show? “, asks Dave Richer to the author of these lines about his first comedy show, Spasme de rire. A difficult question to which it would be tempting to answer an unequivocal yes, the subject of inclusion, in all its forms, being more than ever at the heart of the public space.
Despite his concrete positivism, Dave Richer struggles to find reasons around him not to conclude that people with disabilities remain confined to the blind spot of all efforts to ensure that the proverbial diversity shines on all platforms. .
“When I speak, it’s like music. At first, you don’t understand anything, but after two, three minutes, you pick up my tempo. But the problem is that everything is going so fast and we no longer take the time to listen to others. »
“It’s paradoxical, but the one who opened the door to humor for me was Mike Ward,” laughs Dave Richer, a nod to the Ward-Gabriel affair, which reduced his comedian friend to an image of a vile tormentor. The first of several joint numbers brought them together in 2003 at Just for Laughs, a festival in which the actor had already participated in 1998 by taking one of the main roles in the play 15 seconds by François Archambault, which earned him the Mask of the interpreter of the year in 1999.
At a time when comic speech sometimes seems, rightly or wrongly, to use circumspection, the lover of black humor takes great pleasure, he confides, in saying things that “would not pass at all if they were coming out of anybody else’s mouth.”
But with subjects like career, sexuality and parenting – he is the father of a girl and a boy aged 12 and 10 – Dave Richer hopes above all to present a comedy show… like the others! “The show is about me, so it’s definitely about disability,” he says, “but in the end, I think people will come away with thoughts and questions that belong to all of us.” »
