The French humorist and actor Bun Hay Mean, known by the alias “Chinese funny” and former figure of the Jamel Comedy Club, died Thursday at the age of 43 after falling from the top of his building in Paris. The cause of his death is not yet known.
“It is with infinite sadness that we must announce the tragic disappearance of our friend, our immense artist, Bun Hay Mean,” his producer Philippe Delmas said in a statement, confirming information from the Parisian.
According to the producer, who believes in the accidental track, the humorist would have dropped after trying to recover his phone fallen into the gutter of his balcony. “He had already done this before to recover and we had warned him,” he added.
The Paris prosecutor’s office said it opened an investigation to establish the causes of this death.
At the Jamel Comedy Club
Made famous by his only on stage in the cash tone, the humorist had joined the Jamel Comedy Club in 2016, a Parisian theater founded by Jamel Debbouze who had a whole new generation of humorists hatch.
>> Bun Hay Mean was the guest of Vertigo on June 4, 2018:
Jamel “changed the French audiovisual. It was he who launched all these pirates,” greeted Bun Hay Mean in 2020.
Born near Bordeaux to a Chinese father and a Cambodian mother, the humorist often played, in his shows, stereotypes attached to people of Asian origin. “I am proud to be French and to yell at his mother,” he joked in 2018 on the set of Thierry Ardisson, claiming a very French taste for the rarer.
Small cinema career
He had also made some appearances on the big screen, in “Problemos” (2017) by Eric Judor or “Asterix and Obelix: the Empire of the Middle” (2023), by Guillaume Canet.
“I really liked our meeting and who you were! Rest in peace my friend! What sadness”, deplored on Instagram Guillaume Canet. “Kisses my old man,” wrote Eric Judor on the same social network.
His last appearance in the cinema dates from 2024, with “Les Chèvres!”, Alongside Dany Boon and Jérôme Commandeur.
“I was very bad”
Recently, Bun Hay Mean had revealed that he had suffered from mental health problems about ten years ago, while he was performing on stage while living on the street.
“I was going very badly, I was alone and I had to keep face for the show,” he said on Konbini in 2023. “It’s a huge schizophrenia”. More recently, he had indicated that he had been interned for a few weeks in a psychiatric hospital and was diagnosed with bipolar disorders.
For six months, the humorist had come back on stage and was currently launched in a tour, with a show called “Kill Bun” and dates scheduled until May 2026. “He was well treated, he had returned very strong and he was happy,” said his producer, adding that he had to leave in Montreal on Thursday to play his show.
AFP/AMI