Laurent Gerra has become France’s most popular comedian. By imitating his contemporaries faster than his own shadow, he’s reached a large audience that gives him standing ovations every night in sold-out theatres.

A lover of good food, good wine and proper French songs, loyal to friends who, like him, never take themselves seriously, he’s also cultivated from his earlier years a passion from bande dessinée.

Born in Bourg-en-Bresse in 1967, he owns countless comics carefully stored in the family house, which lies in the middle of the country a few miles from his hometown. So familiar with Luky Luke’s adventures that he knows them by heart, he rose to the challenge of penning new ones, by working as humbly and doggedly as he did when he started in music-hall and radio.

On spiral notebooks, in planes, trains, hotels, the dressing rooms of theatres where he’s performing, armed with pencil and eraser… He designed the layout, panel after panel, of each page of La Belle Province (The Beautiful Province), and polished the story and dialogues over months. This new professional adventure adds to an already full record.

After his beginnings in Paris cabarets, such as the Don Camillo, and on radio station France Inter, he created with Virginie Lemoine a duo that brightened the mornings of Europe 1 radio and the evenings of Studio Gabriel, Michel Drucker’s daily show on France 2.

Some 10 years ago, he also started working with Jean-Jacques Péroni and co-signed, then performed on RTL and France 2, a series of hilarious skits that have now become classics. His most illustrious victims, such as Céline Dion or Johnny Hallyday, don’t hold it against him, though. They know that imitation is the sincerest form of flattery.