René Goscinny would have turned one hundred this year. For countless individuals, his inimitable humor shaped entire childhoods through the power of comic strips. In Madagascar, many grew up delighting in the adventures of Asterix, Lucky Luke, and Iznogoud. Hours of laughter came from Goscinny's scripts, placed within the masterpieces of the ninth art form. These works have retained their remarkable ability to offer us this precious treasure that grows ever rarer.
Libraries, bookstores, and antiquarian dealers across the country long featured comic books bearing Goscinny's name on their covers. His signature became familiar—that of a man possessed of a particular and fertile genius who filled speech bubbles across multiple albums, marking childhoods, adolescences, and youth with stories that have lost none of their flavor in adulthood. When his name resurfaced on the occasion of his centenary, Malagasy readers found themselves seized by memories shaped by his original humor.
Today's child reading Le Petit Nicolas, which adults and adolescents continue to savor, will experience the delight of Goscinny's skill with words. Regardless of age or year, and even though their author would have been one hundred, the dialogues and quips he gave us offer occasions for escape and laughter—at the bureaucratic rigidity of Rome contrasting with Asterix's vibrant village, or at power's comic pretensions where characters echo Iznogoud's catchphrase: "I want to be caliph instead of the caliph."
In his famous work on Laughter, philosopher Henri Bergson describes its mechanism as including intellectual complicity, a shared understanding in which recipients of comedy are conscious of society's rigidities and absurdities. Mockery becomes a tool for those capable of wielding it to correct society. Whether already readers of Goscinny or not yet (but potentially so), we can all still resist through the spirit thanks to albums graced by his pen. Even one hundred years after his birth.
Fenitra Ratefiarivony