Skip To Content
JEWISH. INDEPENDENT. NONPROFIT.
The Schmooze

Francis Veber: Laughter from Pain

The veteran French comedy filmmaker Francis Veber, whose “Le Dîner de cons” was recently remade in Hollywood as “Dinner for Schmucks,” is a master of spoofing painful social anxiety and feelings of exclusion. His new memoir from Les éditions Robert Laffont, “Let This be our Secret,” addresses how Veber’s Jewish roots influenced his comedic skills.

Veber’s maternal grandmother, Marguerite Bernard, was the sister of the French Jewish humorist Tristan Bernard, who was deported to Drancy after the Nazis invaded France, only to be freed after powerful friends like Jean Cocteau objected. Veber’s father, Pierre-Gilles Veber, spent the war years hiding “at the back of our apartment, wearing his pajamas, desperately awaiting the Liberation.” Veber notes: “I was born in Neuilly to a Jewish father and Armenian mother; two genocides, two ensanguined wailing walls, all just to produce a comedian.”

Beaten by classmates who guessed that “this little boy named Veber with a somewhat suspect nose must be Jewish,” the writer and director recalls: “I had become the kike of all these bastards who regularly accorded me a personal pogrom.” Bitter domestic tensions extended from Veber’s parents to his maternal grandmother, who called Pierre-Gilles Veber a “filthy Jew,” since:

like many Russians, [she] didn’t like Jews and found her daughter’s marriage exceedingly hard to accept. One day when I criticized her antisemitism, she defended herself by using the most antisemitic argument I had ever heard: “In our hometown of Armavir,” she explained, “Jews were forbidden entry, so how could I have been antisemitic?”

Launching a career in comedy, first as a playwright and screenwriter, and later as director, Veber’s 1968 play “L’ Enlèvement” (The Kidnapping) offended the French Jewish aircraft industrialist Marcel Dassault (born Bloch), who sued Veber on the grounds that the play mocked the then-recent real-life kidnapping of his wife (a French judge later dismissed the case).

Discovering that in showbiz, “fraternity means vigilant loathing,” Veber recounts his triumphs and disasters with absorbing frankness, including his inadvertent bad timing of releasing a 1973 comedy, “The Suitcase” about an Israeli secret agent kidnapped by Arab spies, the same week in which the tragic Yom Kippur War broke out. Veber is frank about despising some younger Hollywood players, such as the twin screenwriters Daniel and Josh Goldin, whose “ironic little smiles gave me eczema.” “Let This be our Secret” artfully illustrates how producing comedy from historical and personal tragedy has made Veber one of France’s best-appreciated laugh-makers.

Watch part of a 2007 Shanghai stage production of Veber’s “Le Dîner de cons”:

A message from our CEO & publisher Rachel Fishman Feddersen

I hope you appreciated this article. Before you go, I’d like to ask you to please support the Forward’s award-winning, nonprofit journalism during this critical time.

We’ve set a goal to raise $260,000 by December 31. That’s an ambitious goal, but one that will give us the resources we need to invest in the high quality news, opinion, analysis and cultural coverage that isn’t available anywhere else.

If you feel inspired to make an impact, now is the time to give something back. Join us as a member at your most generous level.

—  Rachel Fishman Feddersen, Publisher and CEO

With your support, we’ll be ready for whatever 2025 brings.

Republish This Story

Please read before republishing

We’re happy to make this story available to republish for free, unless it originated with JTA, Haaretz or another publication (as indicated on the article) and as long as you follow our guidelines. You must credit the Forward, retain our pixel and preserve our canonical link in Google search.  See our full guidelines for more information, and this guide for detail about canonical URLs.

To republish, copy the HTML by clicking on the yellow button to the right; it includes our tracking pixel, all paragraph styles and hyperlinks, the author byline and credit to the Forward. It does not include images; to avoid copyright violations, you must add them manually, following our guidelines. Please email us at [email protected], subject line “republish,” with any questions or to let us know what stories you’re picking up.

We don't support Internet Explorer

Please use Chrome, Safari, Firefox, or Edge to view this site.