Rictus: the OCS series that completes LOL, who laughs comes out!
The two creators explain to us how the two programs are fundamentally different, but overlap in a few points.
No laughing allowed! After the success of three seasons of LOL, he who laughs comes out! on Prime Video, OCS in turn plays with this funny concept, but this time in a fiction carried by Fred Testot : Sneer. More than a TV show, Arnaud Malherbe And Marion Festraëts imagined an entire society where it would be forbidden to laugh.
“We wrote Sneer before the broadcast LOL, he who laughs comes out! doesn’t exist, but it’s funny because both rely on the same spring: the moment when we want to laugh the most, in life, is when it’s forbidden“, the two creators tell us. “They did it through a TV show and we made it into a series. It suits me very well if we compare the two, even if afterwards, we can’t really say that the two programs are really similar”, they temper.
Because Sneer indeed leads to a deeper reflection on laughter in general. “There is a parallel with current society, where there are spaces that are monitored, at least on a moral level, even on a legal level. Places where questions like: what can we laugh at? From whom? Are we degrading others? Are we insulting a religion? As development progressed, we understood that the series was ultimately dealing with a current topic.”.
They continue their deciphering of the concept of Sneer : “Laughing and making people laugh is extremely important in our current society, but paradoxically, at the same time, you have to be careful about what you say. It becomes a kind of dynamite to be handled with caution. A bit of a thing sensitive…”
From this point of view, the series and the Prime Video program therefore work on two different dynamics, whichArnaud Malherbe And Marion Festraëts summarize as follows: “In LOL, whoever laughs comes out, we are more in the game. There is a little side of “I hold you, you hold me, by the goatee”. And then Gad Elmaleh – who plays in season 3 – said that, as a professional, it was very destabilizing to do, because he always gets feedback when he screws up. But not on the show. And so it’s an approach to laughter that turns upside down and that’s where it connects Sneer Ultimately !”
The two therefore complement each other and come together above all on an unavoidable fact: it is very difficult not to laugh in real life, whether in the living room of LOL or on the set of Sneer. The two creators say that if the characters of Sneer are not allowed to laugh, the members of the cast did not deprive themselves of it: “It was a fairground. Especially with Fred, who can only work in a happy brothel. Just before we start filming, he acts crazy. In the end, we realized that it’s very hard for an actor to act without smiling and when editing the series, we noticed that if we cut all the sequences with the slightest smile, we no longer had a film!”
Sneer will be available this September 14, 2023 on OCS.
