Could a joke on TikTok and a French writer from 1906
have anything in common? Absolutely.
In this new episode of Le RENDEZ-VOUS du Directeur, Jean-philippe Bottin starts
from a sketch going viral on TikTok to introduce us to Félix Fénéon, a French writer and critic who, in the early twentieth century, wrote
nearly 1,200 "Nouvelles en trois lignes" (News in Three Lines): entire news stories condensed into a single, brutally short sentence, with
the punchline landing like a guillotine blade.
Playing with dryness, irony, and a rhetorical figure that strips out every coordinating word, Fénéon turns tragedy, scandal, and misfortune
into miniature masterpieces of black humor. Beyond the melody of a viral video, this episode shows how artists throughout history have
always turned constraint into art.