The concert hall in the town of La Ciotat, on France's Mediterranean coast, was still empty on November 28. La Chaudronnerie's control room was making final adjustments and Sophia Aram was doing sound checks by projecting the high-pitched, rattling voice of Laurène – the lead character in her one-woman show, Le Monde d'après ("The After World"). Laurène, a caricature of a young "woke" woman, draws "hearts with her hand" and "vaginas with her fingers" in support of "racialized people." "Be careful, with her we set off the hearing aids every time," warned the comedian, who knows her audience – "not very young people, even if some happen to come."

Bernard and Armelle Vieau, a quiet retired couple, felt they were breaking the rules that evening. Their daughter was filled with emotion when she heard they were attending the show: "You're going to see Sophia Aram? But she's becoming racist!" Their son said more modestly that "she's [become] less and less left wing." In the divide among leading public radio France Inter's comic figures, he supports Guillaume Meurice over Aram. Meurice was fired in June 2024 for having called Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu "a kind of nazi, but with no foreskin." He used this description twice on air, despite a first warning. His dismissal caused a stir in France and a deep fracture at France Inter, where part of the staff went on strike and some commentators quit to support him.

The placid Bernard, a septuagenarian with the typical baby-boomer résumé – he took part in the May 1968 student riots, disappointed voter of former Socialist president François Mitterrand and bewildered supporter of Emmanuel Macron – didn't let himself be rattled. "I try to be in the camp of intelligent people," said the former business manager, "even if I don't really know where they are anymore." This feeling gives him something in common with the star of the evening, lost in the fog of a left that no longer resembles him.

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