Swap Marceau for Cousteau and the fun begins
I’ve rescued this post from my old personal blog, which I’ll be retiring soon. The post was written in 2002, when Marcel Marceau was still alive, but Jaccques Cousteau had just died. The importance of that information will soon become clear if you read on…
It’s a shame Jacques Cousteau is dead, as it effectively ruins my chances of ever persuading him to swap places with Marcel Marceau for a day.
One day I had Jacques’ name on the tip of my tongue but just couldn’t get it out, and instead all I could think of was “Marcel Marceau”. In the end I stuttered, “You know, the French guy, not Marcel Marceau, the other one…” My friend patiently ran through the famous Frenchmen he knew: Mitterrand, Basquiat, Belmondo, Tati, Proust (was he French? Deserved to be) and finally Cousteau. “Yes! I cried, that’s the fella!”
Then I realised that the reason I kept thinking Cousteau and coming up with Marceau was that the two men are, on some deeply fundamental level, entirely interchangeable. Both very successful, both world ambassadors-at-large, both very French, both old (fatally so in Cousteau’s case), both dressing up in silly outfits. Their surnames even rhyme.
They are so similar, you could almost swap them and many of us wouldn’t immediately cotton-on. And if you swapped them, it could be a lot of fun.
Remember the Jacques Cousteau TV series? “The Undersea World of Jacques Cousteau” or something similar? Imagine, for a moment, how much fun “The Undersea World of Marcel Marceau” would be. Here is Marcel miming the act of swimming into a strong current. Here is Marcel pretending he is about to be attacked by a great white shark. Here is Marcel 90 feet underwater in only his miming clothes and face-paint, trying valiantly to hold his breath long enough to deliver just one more solo performance piece.
And the comedic potential of Cousteau, on the theatre stage, trying to capture the imagination of a capacity crowd as he mimes walking into a strong wind while dressed in full scuba gear? Priceless.
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