Noël Godin, the Gloupier, Is Gone

Noël Godin was a Belgian humorist, film critic, provocateur and lifelong practitioner of the absurd who spent much of his life reminding the powerful that dignity is often nothing more than a costume, and that even the most solemn public figure can be reduced to a ridiculous human being with a face covered in whipped cream. Better known as Georges Le Gloupier, or simply the Gloupier, Godin turned the cream pie into an instrument of satire and transformed what might otherwise have been dismissed as childish mischief into one of the most recognizable forms of Belgian cultural irreverence of the past half century.

The character of the Gloupier was itself part of the joke. Godin borrowed the name from a fictional, many faced character created by Jean-Pierre Bouyxou, and then gradually allowed this imaginary troublemaker to escape from the pages of fiction and take on a life of his own. The first great demonstration of that idea came in 1969, when Godin targeted Marguerite Duras in Leuven. The episode was not simply a spontaneous prank. Godin had already written about the fictional Gloupier and imagined him committing precisely such acts, and when Duras appeared in Belgium, he decided to make fiction reality. In doing so, he established the essential principle that would govern the rest of his career: the joke was always better when the imaginary world and the real world suddenly collided.

From that moment onward, the Gloupier became a kind of underground theatrical character, appearing without warning at public events and cultural gatherings, usually accompanied by accomplices who understood the choreography. Godin would approach his target, often in front of television cameras and newspaper photographers, shout his unmistakable cry, “Gloup, gloup, gloup, I am the Gloupier,” and then deliver the final blow, a cream pie pressed directly into the face of someone who had acquired, in Godin’s judgment, far too much importance.

The list of his targets eventually became a curious alternative history of European celebrity. Politicians, writers, actors, filmmakers, businessmen and television personalities all found themselves vulnerable. Maurice Béjart, Jean-Luc Godard, Nicolas Sarkozy, Patrick Poivre d’Arvor and Bill Gates were among those who discovered that international fame did not necessarily provide protection against a Belgian man carrying a pie. But no one became more closely associated with the Gloupier than Bernard-Henri Lévy.

Lévy was, in many ways, the perfect Godin target. He was not merely a writer or philosopher but a public intellectual whose appearance, clothing, political interventions and omnipresence in the French media had made him a recognizable cultural institution in his own right. To Godin, there was something irresistibly pompous about a man who seemed determined to occupy simultaneously the roles of philosopher, political commentator, moral authority, celebrity and friend of the powerful. The Gloupier’s answer to all of this was wonderfully primitive. Instead of debating Bernard-Henri Lévy, he put a pie in his face.

The first encounter between the two men took place in 1985, and it would become the beginning of one of the longest running feuds in the history of European comic provocation. Lévy did not regard the incident as particularly funny and reacted with considerable anger, which, from Godin’s perspective, only improved the performance. The more seriously the philosopher treated the attack, the more perfectly he played the role that Godin had written for him. Over the years, Lévy would be entarted again and again, becoming perhaps the most famous recurring victim of the Gloupier. The number is generally given as eight.

There was something almost Shakespearean about the relationship, except that Shakespeare would probably have required a more respectable prop. Lévy represented the solemn world of intellectual authority, political influence and European public debate; Godin represented the court jester who wandered into that world carrying whipped cream. One man had books, television appearances and access to presidents. The other had a pastry. Yet somehow the pastry kept winning.

I had the opportunity to meet Noël Godin several times and to talk with him, and what struck me most was how little malice there was in the man behind the Gloupier. The public image suggested an anarchic troublemaker, someone permanently looking for his next victim, but the man I encountered was much closer to the old idea of the court jester, someone who could mock the powerful without necessarily hating them. His provocations were rarely driven by personal cruelty. They were driven by an almost childlike pleasure in making the serious ridiculous.

That distinction is important because it explains why Godin remained strangely difficult to classify. He was not really an activist, although his actions sometimes carried political implications. He was not simply a comedian, because his performances were often staged outside the conventional world of entertainment. He was not an anarchist in the traditional political sense, although he clearly enjoyed challenging authority. He was something more elusive: a professional irritant to solemnity.

There was, in fact, a distinctly Belgian quality to what he was doing, and to understand the Gloupier properly it helps to look beyond the pies and back into the peculiar history of Belgian surrealism. The country has produced a remarkable tradition of artists who understood that the most effective way to undermine an apparently stable reality is not necessarily to confront it directly, but to make it suddenly absurd.

James Ensor was one of the early masters of this approach. His paintings filled the respectable world with masks, skeletons, grotesque faces and carnival crowds, turning society itself into a theater in which everyone appeared to be wearing a disguise. Ensor’s work was not simply grotesque for the sake of being grotesque. The masks suggested that beneath the respectable appearance of civilization there was something far less orderly, and often far more ridiculous.

René Magritte took the idea in another direction. His great achievement was to make ordinary things suspicious. A pipe could cease to be a pipe. A bowler hat could become an emblem of mystery. A man could float through the sky beneath an umbrella. Words could contradict images, and images could contradict everything the viewer thought he knew. Magritte’s genius was to make the familiar strange without ever completely explaining the joke.

His famous painting of a pipe accompanied by the words “This is not a pipe” remains one of the clearest expressions of that Belgian instinct. The image looks simple, almost childish, until the viewer realizes that Magritte has quietly dismantled the relationship between an object, its image and the word used to describe it. The joke is philosophical, but the philosophy works because the joke comes first.

Noël Godin took that same instinct and moved it out of the museum and into the street. Magritte made language betray the image; Godin made celebrity betray itself. Magritte asked the viewer to question what appeared obvious. Godin asked the public to question why certain people were treated as untouchable in the first place. The technique was less sophisticated, perhaps, but the underlying impulse was surprisingly similar.

The same tradition can be traced through Marcel Broodthaers, whose work repeatedly questioned the authority of museums, institutions, classifications and cultural conventions, and through Philippe Geluck, whose absurdist humor turned the apparently innocent conversations of a philosophical cat into a sustained exercise in undermining human logic. In Belgium, absurdity has rarely meant simple nonsense. It has often been a way of looking at authority from the side, refusing to confront power on its own terms.