“I was rich and I am much less so, it must be admitted”thus confesses, to Tele-Leisurethe only French humorist who filled the Stade de France in 2004. For this show, Jean-Marie Bigard had invested the sum of five million euros. “I booked it in April to do a million-euro rehearsal. Plus four million euros.” The now 68-year-old comedy star explains this colossal amount. “ There no longer has a bulb for rent in Paris. I have two screens of 34 tons and 340 square meters each. I tripled the electric power of the stadium. I had 2.3 million recipes. So I had a 2.7 million deficit when I made the Stade de France. I had planned to compensate with DVD sales. I had to sell 400,000. I sold 1.4 million.”
Without taboo, the comedian – who has made himself heard lately with his political commitments – also confided in his fortune at the time, collected via his shows or his DVD sales (more than 8 million over his career!) . “I was releasing my show at the end of November and at the end of December, I had sold 500,000 DVDs, he assures, always Tele-Leisure. I had on each DVD seven euros. And then 500,000 DVDs the rest of the year. This means that on each show, I earned up to 7 million euros over the year.”
But the glory of the 2000s is no longer that of the 2020s for Jean-Marie Bigard. “I tend to be a bit of a sieve. I squandered all the fortune I earned for others, to do good here and there, indicates the one who was ousted from Big heads of RTL last year. It was around 600 euros per show. If you go twice a week, that’s 1,200. And over four weeks, that’s 4,000 euros.”
