Karim Duval

Karim Duval is a French-Chinese-Moroccan humorist and comedian, born on 8 September 1981 in Aix-en-Provence. He became known through his sketches and shows mixing stand-up, social satire, generational humour and philosophy, addressing themes such as cultural mixing, professional life, the quest for meaning and the contradictions of contemporary society. He is also active on social media, where his humorous videos about the world of work, startups and corporate life are shared on LinkedIn; he has been described as "l'humoriste le plus populaire de LinkedIn".

Born to a Chinese mother and a French-Moroccan father, he grew up in Morocco in the city of Fes. A son of teachers and a brilliant pupil at the lycee francais Paul-Valery in Meknes, he left his childhood country for France, joining the classes preparatoires of the lycee Sainte-Genevieve in Versailles followed by engineering studies at the Ecole centrale de Paris (class of 2005). He then began in 2005 a career as an engineer in computing and applied mathematics, a profession he practised for seven years. He learned improvisation and writing with the company "Artistes antibois associes theatre", which he discovered through a work colleague in 2005, and developed his style based on cultural mixing and travel, performing as an opening act for more famous humorists such as Gaspard Proust, Michel Boujenah and Patrick Timsit.

He created his first show D'un commun accord, whose tour began in 2010 and lasted a year. In 2011 he decided to leave his engineering job and settled in Lyon to devote himself to comedy. His show was reworked with Leon Vitale into a new version titled Melting Pot, which evolved over the years and was performed more than a thousand times on several continents. His later shows include Y (from 2018), about generation Y, and ENTROPIE (from 2023). He also created and hosts Le Bac philo des Humoristes (since 2021), a concept inspired by the philosophy exam of the baccalaureat.