Laugh Riots.(Dieudonne M'Bala M'Bala)

One day last March, on the stage of a theatre in central Paris, a light-skinned black man named Dieudonne M'Bala M'Bala sat with his hands clasped over his knees. Next to him, smiling into the lights, was Jany Le Pen, the wife of Jean-Marie Le Pen, the leader of France's far-right and xenophobic party, the National Front. Dieudonne (he is known only by his first name) is one of France's most successful comedians--once viewed as something of a cross between Lenny Bruce and Sacha Baron Cohen. In recent years, though, his political career has overshadowed his comedy, and he has won a reputation as a committed and vocal anti-Semite. In October, 2006, he dropped out of the 2007 Presidential campaign, after running on an anti-Zionist, "utopian-anarchist" ticket.

The event with Madame Le Pen had been announced on Les Ogres, the Web site that publishes his news and airs videos on him. (The name is an acronym for "geographic, religious, ethnic, and social overtures.") The son of a Cameroonese father and a white French mother, Dieudonne had just returned from Cameroon, where he had filmed with Madame Le Pen their encounters with that country's suffering Baka Pygmy population. The room was filled with journalists from France's main newspapers and television stations.

In the film, Dieudonne and Madame Le Pen, who is in her seventies, are shown trekking through the jungle and holding malnourished Pygmy children in their arms; in one segment they pay for medical treatment for twin girls. After the film, Dieudonne spoke about the plight of the Pygmies--the "little elves of the forest"--who, he said, were victims of a "genocide" being carried out by the logging industry. In addition to the logging trucks, "there is a crossbreeding that amounts to a rape of the Pygmies, the most ancient civilization in the world," he said, apparently referring to intermarriage between Pygmies and other Cameroonians. (Pygmies number nearly forty thousand in Cameroon, or about a quarter of one per cent of its population.) "I propose to bring seven Pygmies here to France to meet the different Presidential candidates and ask them some questions." He looked sternly at the crowd.

Dieudonne is not known for his stance on this indigenous people and their troubles. Rather, he is known for turning the most unlikely cause into a vehicle for attacking Jews. Some of his references to the deforestation of the Pygmies' lands were apparently allusions to Bernard-Henri Levy, the Jewish writer and commentator known as BHL, who is the heir to France's second-largest lumber fortune and who has become one of Dieudonne's fiercest critics. Two years ago, before the comic publicly associated with members of the National Front but well into his anti-Semitic phase, Levy wrote, in his weekly column in Le Point, "Le Pen only had daughters. . . . Well, this has been rectified. Time, that benevolent mother, is giving him sons--finally one, in any case, Dieudonne."

Dressed in black jeans and stylish hiking boots, Dieudonne paced back and forth across the stage, hunching his shoulders with a caged, muscular energy. Journalists shouted questions across the political spectrum, and Dieudonne replied calmly, "Each person has his own political criterion. For some, it is unemployment; for others, security. For me, it will be Pygmies."

In February, Dieudonne had spent a "resistance weekend" (resistance to the Zionist conspiracy, that is) in Tehran, where he was interviewed on two television channels and expressed support for Iran's nuclear program and for President Mahmoud Ahmadinejad's opposition to American hegemony. His political career is a source of consternation to many in France--among them former friends and colleagues. "I knew Dieudonne a few years ago, and he was a gentleman--very funny, very witty, ironic, very wise," Ariel Wizman, a popular French d.j. who also hosts "Idees Fortes," a current-events talk show, told me. "Lots of things would come out of his mouth that were intellectually and morally challenging, as well as hilarious. I can't explain what happened to Dieudo except for deep psychological problems combined with the fact that once he came out this way, went down this road, it was impossible to go back."

By the late nineteen-nineties, Dieudonne had made enough money from show business to buy the Theatre de la Main d'Or. For six years, until 1997, his stage and television partner was Elie Semoun, a Jewish comic and a childhood friend; their act parodied bigotry of all sorts. Wizman recalled that when he first knew Dieudonne he would "make fun of racism from both sides--to develop a really sophisticated, witty position."