Jamel Debbouze was born on June 18, 1975 in Paris. He is the eldest son of four boys named Mohamed, Hayat, Karim, Rashid and a girl named Nawel. After moving to Taza in Morocco, the Debbouze family returned to France two years later and settled in Paris and then in Trappes in 1983.
As a teenager, Jamel Debbouze does the 400 blows with his band of friends. But at the age of 14, he suffered a tragic accident. On January 17, 1990, the young man would have been caught by a Paris-Nantes train at the same time as another boy of his age named Jean-Paul Admette, son of singer Michel Admette. The shock is such that he finally lost the use of his right hand.
“I did something stupid, I didn’t listen to my parents. I went out late when I shouldn’t have gone out late. I found myself on a station platform. I wanted to earn some money. time, I saw the bus go by, I did not want to miss it. I crossed the rails in the middle of the night, without looking either to the right or to the left”, he had told in the program Au tableau on C8 .
A drama that the comedian went through thanks to “denial”: “The only way for me to get past this accident is to say to myself: ‘It does not exist’. It obviously exists, it is there. I put it in my pocket. And I move forward. A way of denying that I was slowed down or diminished, or that I couldn’t do like the others,” he told Konbini.
Faced with this handicap, Jamel Debbouze struggled to move forward. “The day I was told that I would no longer move my arm, I immediately asked the doctor if he could lend me his pen to write with my left hand,” he explained.
In 2004, Jamel Debbouze would have lived a romantic idyll with the writer Saphia Azzeddine. Unfortunately, the couple would have separated after two years of relationship.
The following year, the comedian fell under the spell of host Mélissa Theuriau during the Cannes Film Festival. A year later, on May 7, 2008, they passed the ring on their finger at the Vauy de Cernay abbey estate in the Yvelines. In December 2008, the young woman gave birth to their first child: Léon Ali Debbouze, then in 2011 a girl named Lila Fatima Brigitte Debbouze was born.
Usually very discreet about his private life, the comedian agreed to confide in Madame Figaro about his wife and two children: “In life, we have all experienced more or less hard things: either we put them in his pocket, or we pull them out and confront them. For years, I hid my arm so as not to interfere with me or others. And then my wife or my children would take that arm and pull it out, he says. They were right: we must not deny things, we must put words on them, whether it is disability or racism,” he said.
Thanks to his numerous appearances in the cinema and his successful one-man shows, Jamel Debbouze is one of the favorite comedians of the French. Despite this, in 2017, the star was the victim of several accusations of plagiarism that tarnished her brand image. In October 2017, the YouTube channel called CopyComic highlighted some similarities between his sketches and those of American comedian Dave Chapelle.
Invited to the microphone of RTL in November, the husband of Mélissa Theuriau defended himself from any plagiarism: “Obviously, we are inspired by everything around us, but as far as I am concerned, I do not I’m never modeled after anyone. I write lyrics all day long, I’m inspired by myself and my surroundings. Of course, you can let an ear hang out, but you can’t reduce an artist to that,” he explained.
