Located near the Canal Saint-Martin in the center of the city, Le Paname is Paris’s most influential and legendary comedy club.
Born in New York and Chicago’s urban’s neglected zones, comedy clubs had to reclaim those leftovers and turned them into hype alternative spots. Because comedy clubs often originally occupied industrial brick buildings, the brick wall became the background signature of such clubs in the United States, and, soon enough, all around the world. Original and innovative, this contemporary theater typology breaks the traditional “fourth wall,” an imaginary line between the actors and the audience, by encouraging performers to address and interact directly with the audience.
Le Paname comedy club has been thought of as the direct descendant of the Italian Renaissance’s stage set, which allowed multiple perspectives; a mirror creates a reflection that stretches the stage into endless views. Here, bricks are integral elements of the project, but they are hijacked from the original stand-up classic code as the space bends, expands, twists, and finally dissolves at the very center of the stage, where the comedian stands. It is an accumulation of single bricks rather than a unique wall, a timeline of a progressive urban chaos, from alignment to total explosion.
Moreover, it is the physical representation of the fourth wall’s dissolution, where urbanity explodes and people remain at the center of the stage’s vortex.