one of the most prolific hosts and performers the 'Festival Juste pour rire' has ever had, he presented one new or re-worked monologue for each gala show for the festival's 25th anniversary in the summer of 2007. They paid homage to him with a special gala. He has three daughters, Annie, Karine and Sarah-Émilie. Style Yvon Deschamps' monologues were known for their unrelenting irony, and often buried a message that was completely opposite to what the stage character was saying literally. For Deschamps' first monologue, Les unions, qu'ossa donne?, he created an exploited worker who incarnated the Québécois self-image of a historic past as water-carriers and hewers of wood, and who remained resolutely blind to his exploitation at the hands of his "good" boss. In the beginning, Yvon Deschamps' never-named "character" was distinguished by his spectacular naïvete, which served as a vehicle for Deschamps to tackle delicate subjects such as racism. In Nigger Black, for instance, the character recalled boyhood surprise upon learning that "Nègres" were no more nor less than human beings like him, neither better nor worse: Us, we had some on our street; they lived in the same houses we did, went to the same schools. Hey, even some of us had some, there were French-Canadian "nègres". One of 'em was in my class, his name was Robert. Hey, that was the first time I'd seen a "nègre" named Robert! But, very quickly, Deschamps felt the need to go further outside the usual boundaries. His character began to be more self-assured, his remarks more pointed: In 1972, I decided to write differently and to stage my theatrical shows. It was all about evoking different emotions in the audiences. Discomfort, too. I yelled at my musicians. I pretended to forget things for five minutes. I once even had the sprinklers go off during a show. Until the beginning of the 1980s, I figured I had to go as far as possible in my live shows. My audiences had seen everything. They left the show with their heads between their legs. In L'intolérance, Deschamps tried something riskier: going beyond what his audience could possibly accept. The monologue started quietly, after a long introduction and a song (On va s'en sortir, We'll Manage), with the character warning the public against the dangers of intolerance, which had caused wars, massacres, genocides and other human follies—all that, punctuated with a diatribe against