Pierre Henri Cami

Who was Pierre Henri Cami?

Pierre Henri Cami was a French humorist.

"Though blissfully ignored for most of his life by the English-speaking public, Cami remained for four full decades one of France’s most prolific, and acclaimed, comic authors. Hailed by his idol and admirer Charlie Chaplin as “the greatest humorist in the world,” Cami was somewhat willfully omitted by André Breton from his Anthologie de l’Humour Noir—no doubt on account of his huge popular success—but admired by other Surrealists. Between 1910, when he founded Le Petit Corbillard Illustrè, the “humorous organ of the corporation of undertakers,” and his death in 1958, Cami published well over forty volumes of minidramas and comic novels—notably The Memoirs of God-the- Father, The Adventures of Loufock-Holmes, The Son of the Three Musketeers, and the travels of his perhaps most famous creation, Monsieur Rikiki and the Rikiki family— as well as countless songs, strip cartoons, screenplays and even operettas. Many of these he also illustrated. But Cami was best known for his “dramatic fantasies,” written mostly for La Vie Drôle, the humorous column published weekly by Le Journal, where he had stepped, somewhat belatedly, into the shoes of that column’s immortal co-founder, Alphonse Allais. Self-styled microdramas of everyday life, of legend, of history, of true romance, and more often than not of volupté, these screwball skits look backward to the music hall and Alfred Jarry, sideways to the Marx Brothers and forward to, in England, the Goons and, in France, to the Theatre of the Absurd." —John Crombie