A thug’s grub

Renaud Séchan (known as just “Renaud”) has been a particularly popular French singer-songwriter since the seventies. This success relies in part on the persona he builds of an angry, yet sentimental, small-time thug, and on a humorous language, including frequent puns. In this paper, we show how both humour and the creation of a thug character bind to the themes of food and drink, as well as the less prevalent theme of vomit. Renaud describes food from the angle of abundance or scarcity, to signal groups who have and groups who have not. Furthermore, he uses both food and drink as markers of the separation between his beer-drinking, candy-stealing peers and a more dominant community of wine-drinkers and meat-eaters. To verify this hypothesis, we propose a quantitative analysis of all the mentions of food, drink, as well as vomit, in a corpus encompassing Renaud’s song production between 1975 and 2016, as they appear in his collected works, published with the artist’s approval in 2017. We show how these mentions are used as social as well as gender markers, the latter particularly for drinks. We also explore their role in the humorous mechanisms of Renaud’s songs, taking advantage of our quantitative analyses to show how these mentions are often found at the very end of joke-like patterns. This combination of distant reading and close analysis also brings insight into the rich ambivalence of Renaud’s thug character, fluctuating between gender stereotypes and gender fluidity, self-deprecation and hostile outbursts.