Bruno Coppens

Bruno Coppens, born on 5 June 1960 in Tournai (province of Hainaut), is a Belgian humorist, writer, actor, comic-book scriptwriter and columnist. He was born to a Flemish mother and a Walloon father; Rene Coppens was a pharmacist and Jenny Schelstraete looked after their eight children (Bruno is the second to last of the siblings). In 1978, he began studies in Romance languages and literature at Louvain-la-Neuve, where he developed a taste for theatre. He was briefly a French teacher but quickly felt it was not his path. He worked at Notele, the local television of the Tournaisis, then went to the north of France near Roubaix where C9 Television had just been created, creating his own weekly comedy column Scoop, toujours pret! which lasted four years. Canal+ Belgique then called on his services as a scriptwriter for the comedy capsule Les Decodeurs de l'info.

At the beginning of the 1980s, he tried out different stages and won, in 1982, the public and press prize at the festival international du rire de Rochefort (Belgium). Encouraged by this success, he surrounded himself with artists such as Eric De Staercke and Lorent Wanson. For 20 years he has performed a series of one-man shows: from Ma Declaration d'humour to Ma Terre happy !, including Mes singeries vocales at the theatre La Pepiniere in Paris, then Trac !, La Vie est un destin anime, Lovebooke, Andropause, Je mene une vie scene and Raymond de rond en large (2023), in Belgium and abroad (in Quebec since 2001), in Switzerland and Tunisia. In 2023, he incarnated the lion, the main character of a show combining dance, circus, puppets and video projections, Le Carnaval des animaux, staged by Luc Petit at the salle philharmonique de Liege.

Alongside the stage, he was a columnist for Stephane Bern's show Le Fou du roi on France Inter and, in Belgium, for the Jeu des dictionnaires and the Semaine infernale on La Premiere (RTBF). On television, from 1994 to 2010, he played Monsieur Virgule in the show Ici Bla-Bla on the RTBF. In 2023, he wrote the comic-book script Pensees obscures for the Swiss illustrator Jo Ted. He is also an author of children's and youth literature, notably L'Atelier des mots, illustrated by Pascal Lemaitre, published in 2002. In 2005 he was made Chevalier de l'ordre de la Couronne.