After the sudden death of comedian Guillaume Bats, the Le Paris theater launched a call for applications to offer its room for the time of the Avignon festival to a young talent to replace him. “Leaving a void in the programming of Paris would be adding a void to the void that Guillaume will leave behind him and that does not make much sense,” wrote the director of the establishment Grégory Cometti, on Facebook.
Then he immediately added, “We will simply offer the room for the entire duration of the Festival on the slot that Guillaume was to occupy” to a “young comedian still unknown” because “I very much doubt that he would have wanted, instead of his show, from a closed room so deserted and that the laughter is silent there between 7:40 p.m. and 9 p.m.
Guillaume Bats, suffering from brittle bone disease, died at the age of 36 in early June. He was on tour for his new show Inchallah and was to perform from July 7 to 29 at the Off d’Avignon festival, one of the major theater events in France with the “In”. “The only limit to our initiative will be to find a quality show that can defend itself among the 1,650 shows that will be present in Avignon in July. The idea is not to send an artist to hell,” concluded Grégory Cometti.
Guillaume Bats, prince of self-mockery, passed away on June 1, 2023
Born in Reims in 1987, Guillaume Bats had revealed a difficult life course: abandoned by his mother before his first birthday, he had spent a large part of his childhood between an orphanage and foster families. According to the site Dark Smile Productions, the artist began to develop sketches in the late 2000s before being noticed for his caustic humor on the Internet and in television shows, such as “We only ask to laugh about it by Laurent Ruquier. Produced by Jérémy Ferrari and Éric Antoine, Guillaume Bats has toured several times in France, already performing at the 2016 and 2017 editions of the Festival Off d’Avignon.
