Career
"Though blissfully ignored for most of his life by the English-speaking public, Cami (Pierre Henri) remained for four full decades one of France’s most prolific, and acclaimed, comic authors. Hailed by his idol and admirer Charlie Chaplin as “the greatest humorist in the world,” Cami was somewhat willfully omitted by André Breton from his Anthologie de l’Humour Noir—no doubt on account of his huge popular success—but admired by other Surrealists. Between 1910, when he founded Le Petit Corbillard Illustrè, the “humorous organ of the corporation of undertakers,” and his death in 1958, Cami published well over forty volumes of minidramas and comic novels—notably The Memoirs of God-theFather, The Adventures of Loufock-Holmes, The Son of the Three Musketeers, and the travels of his perhaps most famous creation, Monsieur Rikiki and the Rikiki family— as well as countless songs, strip cartoons, screenplays and even operettas.
Many of these he also illustrated.
Self-styled microdramas of everyday life, of legend, of history (and even of geography), of true (and false) romance, and more often than not of volupté, these screwball skits look backward to the music hall and Alfred Jarry, sideways to the Marx Brothers and forward to, in England, the Goons and, in France, to the Theatre of the Absurd." —John Crombie (Introduction to A Cami Sampler)
See A CAMI SAMPLER. Translated from the French by John Crombie. Publisher: Black Scat Books.
A collection of Cami"s comic microdramas, plus a selection of his drawings. Read Doug Skinner"s translation of Cami"s The Manitoba in the Iron Mask.
