Comedian Jamel Debbouze Reflects on Life-Changing Accident That Cost Him His Arm

The accident dates back to 1990. Jamel Debbouze, then 14 years old, was hit by the Paris-Nantes train at the Trappes station on January 16. At the hospital, the doctor tells him that he will no longer be able to use his right hand. This news is far from saddening him. "The first reflex I have when the doctor announces it to me is to ask him to lend me one of the colored pens he has in his pocket, because right away, I’m practicing to start writing with my left hand. As if this accident was a non-issue. As if it wasn’t supposed to be an issue," Jamel Debbouze recounts in an interview with the magazine « Jeux vous aime » by Patrick Sébastien.

"I started dancing right away. It was a way of denying that I was slowed down or diminished or that I couldn’t do like the others. It was unthinkable. Unthinkable not to achieve my goals, that is to say, to live as I saw fit: to laugh and make people laugh," he adds. This accident did not make the Franco-Moroccan comedian a broken man, but it shattered his childhood dream of becoming a soccer player. "Would you have been happier if you had become a soccer player, your first passion?" Patrick Sébastien asks him. "Missed vocation, all because of my meniscus! Otherwise I would have had an international career! Since my accident, everything I’ve lived is a bonus, a reprieve," replies the husband of Mélissa Theuriau.