June 23, 2012  

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Les Maudits Rois fainéants est un feuilleton télévisé humoristique de Maritie et Gilbert Carpentier diffusé en direct en 1973 sur la deuxième chaîne de télévision française, avec les comédiens Roger Pierre et Jean-Marc Thibault.
Il s'agit d'une parodie du feuilleton télévisé à succès Les Rois maudits (feuilleton réalisé par Claude Barma en 1972 à partir d'une adaptation par Marcel Jullian de la suite romanesque éponyme de Maurice Druon). Le titre « fusionne » ces « rois maudits » et les « rois fainéants », comme furent surnommés les derniers rois mérovingiens.

Le feuilleton présentait la particularité remarquable d'être diffusé en direct, ce qui bien sûr entraînait des écarts par rapport au texte prévu. Les comédiens se mettaient alors à improviser, dans de grands éclats de rire, provoquant un sentiment de jubilation.

Le feuilleton Les Maudits Rois fainéants fut suivi d'une suite intitulée Les Z'heureux Rois z'Henri, également avec Roger Pierre et Jean-Marc Thibault.

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If you have ever had the curiosity to take a close look at a church organ, you will know how the bellows force the air into certain vessels (technically known as ‘wind-trunks’, I believe); and how the air goes from there into the pipes, in combinations depending on the various ways the organist moves their fingers over the keyboard. But here you could imagine that the heart and the arteries pushing the animal spirits into the cavities of the brain of our machine, are like the bellows of an organ forcing the air into the wind-trunks; and that the external objects making the spirits in the cavities enter specific pores, depending on which nerves they stimulate, are like the fingers of the organist making the air enter the wind-trunks of specific pipes, depending on which keys they depress. Again, the harmony of an organ depends neither on the arrangement of the pipes visible from the outside, nor on the shape of its wind-trunks or other parts, but only on three [166] things: namely, the air which comes from the bellows, the pipes which produce the sound, and the distribution of the air in the pipes. Similarly, I want to point out to you that the bodily functions we are dealing with here do not in any way depend on the external shape of all those visible parts which anatomists distinguish in the substance of the brain or its cavities; but only on the spirits which come from the heart, on the pores in the brain through which they pass, and on the way the sprits are distributed in these pores. Hence all that remains is for me to explain one by one what is most noteworthy in these three things. . . . --Descartes, Treatise on Man, Translation © George MacDonald Ross, 1975–1999