From Moroccan Hospital to Comedy Stage: Booder’s Journey of Healing Through Humor

"If I do all this, it’s to fight this disease that is regret! I’m a real jack-of-all-trades! If I’ve taken the stage, it’s to then move on to cinema, which I’ve also grown to enjoy. Everything happened in chronological order, a natural order," Booder confides in an interview with Pays d’Auge during the opening of the Estuaire d’en Rire festival on Tuesday, September 9, 2025. The comedian indeed had health issues when he was young. As a child, he had left his native Morocco for France where he received treatment. He was hospitalized at Necker for six years with "back and forth" visits. He had serious lung problems (severe asthma and bronchiolitis) just a few months after his birth in Morocco.

Art, more precisely, humor, has become his outlet. "For me, humor has always been an escape, a way to defuse complicated situations. With a smile and a well-placed joke, without being insolent, we avoid conflict. It’s also easier now, with my notoriety, because when people meet me, they usually have a smile on their face. When I was young, it was my weapon of mass destruction, it allowed me to impose myself in my class, to be loved by everyone, even the teachers, even though I sometimes risked expulsion or bad grades..., he recounts. It was the same for school bullying: I was lucky to be born with a quick wit, so people feared my rapid-fire comebacks! It was the one who sows who reaps!"

On Tuesday, Booder opened the Estuaire d’en Rire Festival with his show Ah... school! Where did the inspiration come from? "The very first motivation comes from my son. I write a lot at night, in my living room, in the dark, with the TV on. I get myself in the mood. My son came to see me in the middle of the night, saw me scribbling. I told him I was looking for ideas and he replied, "Well, good luck, I hope you’re not going to put yourself in the spotlight with self-deprecation again! We’ve understood, no more jokes about you!" he recounts.

He adds: "It was a shock in my head. Maybe the fact that I make fun of myself in my show bothers him, now that he’s 14 years old. So I had to talk about something else, things that touch him. I threw away the four pages I had already written and came across an article about a young girl with school bullying issues. Yet it’s very difficult to talk about it, so I had to start with a lot of very funny things and end with this problem, a wake-up call." The comedian says he then chose to write a somewhat poetic text, as he does not conceive of making humor for the sake of humor.

He continues: "Beware, I’m not a preacher, but I report on things I see in the news, that I experience when I go to hospitals to see the children. And it’s very serious because you have to know that in France, it’s the bullied person who has to change schools, not the bully! It’s a double punishment!"