Djalel Biad

D'jal, real name Djalel Biad, is a French stand-up comedian, actor and screenwriter born in 1981 in Charenton-le-Pont in the Paris suburbs. He is of Moroccan origin and the eldest of seven siblings, raised in a multicultural Parisian banlieue environment that shaped his ear for accents and characters. Before comedy he worked various jobs including in a myopathies support center, where he used humor to lift patients' spirits. After developing material on open-mic stages across Europe and North America, including at the Just for Laughs Festival in Quebec, he was discovered by Jamel Debbouze and invited to the Jamel Comedy Club, which gave him national visibility.

D'jal's first solo show "Just D'jal" toured from 2013 to 2017 and was performed more than a thousand times in front of over 400,000 spectators across France, including runs at the Theatre Trevise, Theatre des Feux de la Rampe, the Olympia, the Alhambra and the Casino de Paris. The show was built around a gallery of recurring characters delivered with extreme precision in accents, most famously his Portuguese character which became a cult figure of French stand-up. In 2017 he returned with "A coeur ouvert", a more personal and emotional show that took audiences from laughter to tears while bringing back his most popular characters; the tour ran through 2023 and played the Palais des Sports / Dome de Paris and venues across France, Belgium, Switzerland and Quebec. Alongside stand-up he appears regularly in French cinema and television, with roles in films such as Pattaya (2016), Les Vacances des Tuche (2015) and several comedies, and he continues to write and direct his own touring shows.

D'jal continues to tour France, Belgium, Switzerland and Quebec with versions of his show "A coeur ouvert" and new material. His earlier show "Just D'jal" remains a reference point of 2010s French stand-up and clips are widely available on YouTube. Official tour dates are published on his website djal.fr.