Paul Houde

Early Life and Education

Paul Houde Jr. was born in the Montreal suburb of Saint-Laurent. His father, Paul Houde Sr., was a saxophonist, and his mother, Aline Achim, was a homemaker. He had two siblings, a brother, Pierre (who became a well-known Quebec sportscaster), and a sister, Johanne.

Houde grew up in the Montreal suburb of Laval. He earned his Bachelor of Science in geography from the Université de Montréal in 1979. He discovered his innate talent as a communicator while in university, when he became a spokesperson for a student group. Houde recounted how other students noticed his ability to summarize important points and that he could easily keep his cool in front of journalists.

Career Highlights

With a talent for public speaking and some experience talking to the media, Houde was quickly picked up by Montreal radio station CKAC 730 AM. He started his career at the station in May 1975. Over the course of his career, Houde hosted an estimated 600 radio shows, most of them morning programs on CKAC, as well as CKMF-FM and CFGL-FM.

Among his many talents as a broadcaster, Houde was well respected for speaking an accurate an elegant French, as he often avoided popular Québécois slang. (See also Joual.) Though he was best known for most of his career as a morning man on French-language radio stations in Montreal, his last long-term role was hosting a drive-time show on 98.5 FM, a position he held from 2007 to 2019.

Houde was also a regular on Quebec television for over 40 years. An appearance on the sketch comedy show Vaut mieux en rire in 1982 was his first television credit. Houde frequently participated in TV variety shows over the course of his career, on Radio-Canada, TVA and Télé-Québec. A natural storyteller with an engaging personality, Houde hosted shows such as Le Cercle and Lingo and was a contributing columnist on Marc Labrèche’s show La fin du monde est à 7 Heures. The series ran for 555 episodes; Houde was in more than 400 of them.

Houde was a gifted comic actor with a strong talent for impersonation. This led him to appear on the annual New Year’s Eve comedy sketch show Bye Bye, as well as similar sketch comedy shows that lampooned public figures and current events. He was also a voice-over artist, contributing to 41 episodes of the program Les Justiciers, a reality TV program in which lawyers deliberate small-claims court cases.

Paul Houde is probably best known in English Canada for his role in the popular Les Boys film series. He played Fern (Fernand), a goaltender with an encyclopedic knowledge of sports statistics. Much like his character in the films, Houde also had a fascination with sports statistics. His interest in sports and talents as a broadcaster led him to work as an analyst during broadcasts of both summer and winter Olympics. His coverage of the 1992 Olympic Summer Games in Barcelona earned him a Prix Gémeaux in 1993.

Other Activities

Paul Houde was well-known as a polymath. In addition to his wide-ranging career in Quebec radio, film and television, as well as his aptitude for statistics, he was also an amateur astronomer. He  twice won an amateur telescope building contest. He was enamoured of aviation and space exploration, as well as the United States. Late in his career, he explored his fascination with the United States in a documentary called Paul dans tous ses états (a pun on the word états, which can mean both a state of mind or being as well as an organized political state).

Houde was also fascinated by eclipses and was one of the most active eclipse chasers in Quebec. Eclipse chasing brought him to India, Mexico, Austria and Indonesia, among other locations. His wide-ranging and expansive knowledge led him to be nicknamed WikipéHoude, and “encyclopedia on two feet.”

Houde may have at one point held a world record for travelling around the world on commercial airliners, something he did October 11–13 1996, in a time of 40 hours and 17 minutes.

Later in life, shortly before he passed away due to complications after brain surgery, Houde was diagnosed as being on the autism spectrum.