The French interior minister Laurent Nunez has filed a complaint against satirist and humourist Pierre-Emmanuel Barré for joking about the police on a radio show.
During La Dernière, aired on November 9 by underground outlet Radio Nova and made available on the internet on November 12, Barré compared law enforcement officers to “Daesh with job security”.
Daesh is a pejorative term for the terrorist group known as the Islamic State.
He described the police and gendarmerie as “structurally brutal, racist and irresponsible institutions”.
The comedian added: “Rape, mutilation, murder and guys filming themselves doing all this while laughing … in fact, the police and gendarmerie are Daesh with job security.”
After the clip circulated online, Nuñez announced he had filed a complaint with the Paris public prosecutor, condemning “unspeakable remarks”.
The police union Un1té also reacted, denouncing the comedian’s “disgusting comments”, which it said were made “while France is honouring the police officers who saved lives on 13 November 2015”.
That was referring to the horror on the evening of November 13, 2015, in which jihadist gunmen and suicide bombers conducted a sequence of co-ordinated attacks that culminated in a bloody raid on the Bataclan concert hall in eastern Paris.
The union insisted Barré’s comments “should be referred without delay to Arcom [France’s audiovisual regulator] and to the courts”.
Radio Nova issued a statement on November 15, stressing that Barré “has absolutely no connection with the attacks of November 13 2015”.
It added: “Safeguarding the freedom of those who make us laugh also means safeguarding the health of our democracy.”
Radio Nova insisted that it “will not tolerate any form of intimidation against its comedians or contributors”.
Commenting on Radio Nova’s statement yesterday, Barré took another jab at the police: “Nova propre et sans bavure [clean and flawless]: A change from the police,” he said.
Yesterday, the team behind La Dernière, led by comedian Guillaume Meurice, responded to Nuñez.
Meurice defended his colleague and said he was surprised that the interior minister had filed a complaint about that particular sentence.
He noted that Nuñez had not objected to another segment, in which Barré said: “For my part, I strongly suspect that Laurent Nuñez is a big piss tank,” after recounting Nuñez’s comments following police violence during the 2023 demonstrations in Sainte-Soline.
Then, activists clashed with French police protesting against the construction of water reservoirs for farmers in Sainte-Soline, western France.
Meurice was himself fired from State-owned radio station France Inter for inappropriate joke about Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu, whom he said was “a Nazi without a prepus [foreskin]”.
Barré is best known in France for his vulgar jokes. In the past, he quit the programme La Bande Originale on France Inter due to what he called “censorship”.
