'Gad Gone Wild' - Movie Review

This is classified by Wikipedia as a "stand-up special" (not incorrect) but apparently they don't consider it a movie. But it's available on Netflix. Gad Elmaleh is apparently France's (current) most successful stand-up comic. In 2015, he brought that act to Montreal, a city he was actually familiar with having spent some years in university there. And of course he could do the show in French, a language he's familiar with - which is kind of important considering he spends a good chunk of the show making fun of the English language (particularly as spoken by Americans). Making fun of Americans is of course a good topic to bring before any Canadian audience, but he's also making fun of the French in France, and he's doing it all in French - the Montreal audience just eats it up.

One of his favourite jokes (which he told on several night shows around the time this movie was released) has him describing asking a cab driver in New York to take him to GFK Airport: any French speaker, or even any English speaker who's tried to learn French, knows that it's very, very easy to reverse "G" and "J" (the sounds are reversed in the other language). Which makes this a lot funnier if you have some familiarity with the other language, but he manages to milk the joke even if you speak only English.

He mostly mines his own life experience (and it's a pretty extraordinary life, having been born in Morocco, grown up in France, spent time in Canada, and now living in New York ...) for jokes. And he does it in good humour and with only limited swearing. I found it very funny.