Born November 9, 1922, in Mouscron, Belgium, but from a paternal family from the North, Raymond Devos is French. He grew up in Tourcoing where he discovered the circus and music. Louis Devos, his father, experiencing reverses of fortune, he left school at 14, followed his parents to Paris and worked at Les Halles.
Passionate about theatre, he took lessons until 1943, when the STO forced him to work in a factory in Berlin. Back in France after the armistice, he learned mime and began to play classics in theater troupes. In 1950, he created with an actor friend, Robert Verbecke, a comic duo, "Les Pinsons", where he played the guitar. They performed successfully at Les Trois Baudets. In 1955, he joined Jacques Fabbri's troupe for a tour that took him one evening to Biarritz. In a café, when he tells the waiter that he would like to see the sea, the latter objects that it is disassembled. Tit for tat, he replies: “When are you putting it back together? This is the starting point for a first sketch that will make him a master of the absurd.
His leitmotif: start from a double meaning word, from a real situation and dive into the imagination. In the 50s and 60s, he performed in several theaters and music halls in Paris and throughout France. He also created troupe shows, such as Les Pupitres, on display for two years. From the 1970s, he definitively imposed on the stage a character where he was a word juggler, clown, mime and musician all at the same time. His monologues are now studied in schools and regularly taken up by actors or young comedians. Before leaving us on June 15, 2006, he created a foundation which made it possible to transform his house in Saint-Rémy-lès-Chevreuse into a museum retracing his career and today offering cultural projects combining memory, creation and transmission.
