International comedy: A request

[wingco]

I wonder if I could avail of the font of wisdom on all things that is OTF? I'm currently writing a history, of sorts, of British comedy. I'm pretty much at the end, then it's the overarching intro to do. A couple of general points I'll be making are the the British punching so far above their weight in terms of comedy is of a piece with our disinclination to political revolt; a displacement activity, the function of which is to keep things as they are. Also, I believe it's to do with the fact that we Brits, shamefully, are monolingual; interesting how much traditional comedy has taken refuge in the nuances of our own language, which foreigners, who in their obtuseness speak English less well than we do, simply don't get.

I know that a lot of British comedy has been exported worldwide but I'm looking for examples of comedy from countries where English isn't the first language (so not USA, Canada, Australia), some of which might not have travelled abroad, doesn't "translate" well, the forms it takes, its tropes, stuff I could follow up. One or two examples of the sort of thing I'm thinking of are Jacques Tati and the visual language of his movies which, though it owes something to Chaplin feels distinctly like comedy in a foreign "language"; also the way humour is so effectively and elegantly deployed in pop - I'm thinking here particularly of Kraftwerk and Belgian electronic group Telex. But I could do with a good few more, even if it's merely to cite them.

Does that make sense? Any suggestions much appreciated.

[Snake Plissken]

Does Japan count? They have a sort of "theatre of cruelty" to some of their comedy/quiz shows that where we Brits would use gunge, they use violence. Or maybe that is just looking at their stuff through the wrong lens, I dunno, half-formed thought.

[Balderdasha]

Look up Chinese xiangsheng / crosstalk: https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Xiangsheng

It is completely incomprehensible to most non-native Mandarin Chinese speakers, yet it is still fascinating to watch, in part for the lyrical cadences and fast patter. Dashan / Mark Roswell mostly became famous in China because he's pretty much the only Westerner who has ever successfully learned to perform xiangsheng.

[ursus arctos]

I don't speak the language, but humiliation seems to be at the core of that school of Japanese humour

Which makes sense given the centrality of "face" in Japanese culture and the myriad unwritten rules one can violate. Though that school of comedy focuses very much on broad physical humour rather than the more subtle psychological challenges that the Japanese face.

I've never looked at this, but have wondered to what extent there is "National" comedy in multilingual countries like Switzerland, India or the Philippines. My guess is that it would involve a lot of physical humour should it exist.

[Satchmo Distel]

I think Mr Bean owes something to Tati. Maybe Rowan Atkinson could be viewed as an exception as someone who seemed aware of non-Anglophone traditions?

I'd also note that a lot of American comedy has its roots in Yiddish, most notably the Marx Brothers.

[WOM]

I wish I could remember the details, but I remember Phil Hartman talking about doing standup comedy in Germany many years before SNL and The Simpsons. One of his stronger bits was doing impressions of US actors (John Wayne for example) in German, which apparently killed for some bizarre reason.

[Balderdasha]

Mr Bean is super popular in Asia (or was 10-15 years ago). It was always being played on loop at airports in the region.

[ad hoc]

There's a difference between literature and TV/stage here isn't there? My experience of much of Europe/the middle east is that there is typically a rich tradition of satire and clever word play in literature across the whole region. But on TV it's nearly all slapstick/crude Benny Hill/Carry On type stuff

[Lymeswold Snork]

Might Henning Wehn be able to help?

There was a French sketch show, "Women!" ("Vous les femmes") shown on TV a few years ago: very similar to "Smack the Pony", I thought.
https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/WOMEN!

[Balderdasha]

There's always Eddie Izzard who performs in French as well as English.

[G-Man]

It's very difficult to reduce a nation's humour to one style. German humour has a lot of slapstick and stupid faces (Dieter Hallervorden is a good example of that), but a lot is also based satire and anti-authoritarianism/non-conventionalism. British humour has plenty of the former (such as Mr Bean), and Germans do like the exotic "dry English humour" which relies on understatement (Monty Python). So English comedy travels quite well to Germany, except for most conventional sitcoms because they're neither slapstick nor "dry". That kind of thing, the Germans can do well enough themselves, danke.

One UK sitcom that might have done well in West-Germany but was instead adapted was Till Death Do Us Part. The German version, Ein Herz und eine Seele, was more satirical than the English (or US) counterparts. There was no question that the German show's bigot, Alfred Tetzlaff, might be in any way lovable. He was small-minded and pretty nasty, with no great redeeming features. But he was not an exaggeration either. Tetzlaff lives on in the AfD and the CSU.

I fear most British satire won't travel well to Germany, because it tends to play for laughs and blunts its edges to get them, whereas German satire firstly aims to draw blood, with laughter the reward. I think The Office might be as close as I've seen British satire comes to notions of German satire.

[Ginger Yellow]

My experience of much of Europe/the middle east is that there is typically a rich tradition of satire and clever word play in literature across the whole region. But on TV it's nearly all slapstick/crude Benny Hill/Carry On type stuff

This is very much my impression of French comedy (with movies just as slapstick as TV), but I wouldn't pretend to have a representative understanding of the genre there. That's not to say there isn't some sly humour - Vivement Dimanche! springs to mind, though it is very much an homage to US films.

[wingco]

Great response already, thanks everyone! Will come back properly later.

[Aitch]

Dinner For One is an enormous New Year's Eve hit in Germany but virtually unknown in the UK, despite its being in English and starring an English butler.

[Diable Rouge]

Mr Bean is super popular in Asia (or was 10-15 years ago). It was always being played on loop at airports in the region.

Similarly, as we learnt from Michael Palin's travelogues, Monty Python proved particularly popular in Yugoslavia - perhaps in a then-extant country with so many languages, the sketches worked almost as though they were silent.

[Nocturnal Submission]

I think Mr Bean owes something to Tati. Maybe Rowan Atkinson could be viewed as an exception as someone who seemed aware of non-Anglophone traditions?

I'd also note that a lot of American comedy has its roots in Yiddish, most notably the Marx Brothers.

I remember reading a fascinating article a few years ago, the central premise of which was something along the lines of conventional Western comedy tracing its lineage to one of a number of competing forms of humour which co-existed in East European Jewish culture many hundreds of years ago. TBH, I found it rather hard to get my head around the idea of these different strands existing at such a distant point in the past but the theory was quite compelling.

[Nocturnal Submission]

I remember reading a fascinating article a few years ago, the central premise of which was something along the lines of conventional Western comedy tracing its lineage to one of a number of competing forms of humour which co-existed in East European Jewish culture many hundreds of years ago. TBH, I found it rather hard to get my head around the idea of these different strands existing at such a distant point in the past but the theory was quite compelling.

This doesn't really cover the competing traditions aspect, but it does provide something of the flavour: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Jewish_humor

[Snake Plissken]

Stewart Lee has an interview with someone on that Radio 4 tag interview show and has a interesting story about the Hopi Indians and how their clowns were the only ones allowed to disrespect their elders.

A quick Google later:

Chain Reaction - https://www.bbc.co.uk/programmes/b00l5p7l

He's interviewed by Johnny Vegas and it's a great listen.

Edit: He made a documentary on it.

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=cOhonL79ilc

[Satchmo Distel]

There's also The Fool in medieval England, as in King Lear. Not sure if other European monarchies had the equivalent.

In industrial England, I imagine that music hall functioned as bread and circuses to distract the masses, and of course England had its industrial revolution earlier than elsewhere.

[laverte]

i wonder what the timeline for this is. Perhaps, with the sitcom at its best-loved form, and social class as its abiding theme, British comedy is easier to trace through the ages.

French comedy has a couple of similarities with British/English. A lot of it is focused on language, wordplay, sounds, the in/correct deployment of formal modes of discourse, etc. This is one of my favourite stand-up routines, by the Belgian comic Raymond Devos. It's a comedy of misunderstanding, as the Devos character's attempts to book a holiday are frustrated by four homonyms, so that he and the booking agent are constantly talking past each other: for example, two of the destinations, Sete and Troyes, are also times (7 and 3) at which coaches are due to leave. The interesting thing in comparison with British comedy is the tone: Devos sounds, typically, exasperated even before he begins recounting the conversation. His voice is at the top of its pitch and we get a sense that he could burst any minute right from the beginning. This is characteristic of French comedy, and it's what draws us to the character, makes us identify with him: this sort of enervated, ranting futility in the face of an incomprehensible system such as the French language and its gatekeeper, the booking agent. A British comedian would probably do this routine as a deadpan observer with a raised eyebrow. French people like the stiff upper lip in Miss Marple adaptations but not in humour.

French comedy tends to be manic, embodied, exaggerated, and the central character is often a rather unsocialised figure. Viz Louis de Funes in one of the best-known film sequences in France, which isn't funny but wouldn't even be conceivable as humour were it not for the relatability of Rabbi Jacob. The Pink Panther films and The Party (which was still broadcast regularly into this century) are hugely popular in France, and part of the reason is that the setup of seething boss and childlike underling is very familiar.

Another similarity with the UK is the route to success. Many French comedians started in comedy clubs, which are very frequent, and especially in cafe-theatre, where they develop sketches and characters, similar i think to how the end of the pier used to work in England, although the results are a bit closer to theatre rather than vaudeville. Victoria Wood might remind me of this type. Cafe-theatre is written and performed in troupes or sometimes in pairs, and the most successful of these go on to make films (rather than sitcoms) and tv sketch shows. Stand-up, on the other hand, is more individualised, and might lead to a spot on talk shows (there aren't really panel shows, but the semi-improvised riffing format is similar) and on radio. There's a national radio station, Rire et Chansons, which broadcasts famous comedy sketches and routines, lots of them from the 1970s and 1980s, quite a few of them from tv but obviously soundtrack only, so that young French people are more likely to be familiar with Pierre Desproges or Chevallier et Laspales than young Brits would be with, say, the standup of Billy Connelly or Dave Allen.

Cafe-theatre often treats domestic themes like relationships and dating and so it is less male-dominated than standup or the end of the pier. The most famous troupe, la Splendide, has made a few of the most famous French comedy films like Les Bronzes Font Du Ski and Le Pere Noel Est Une Ordure, which are an institution, broadcast every christmas. (Forty years on its alumni are still box office gold, with eg the starring role in the Asterix franchise.) These films tend to differ from British ones in that although they're about the absurdity of social encounters, the focus is less on the situation (eg, having to talk to your annoying neighbour) and more on the individual's bodily incapacity to adjust to it.

In the 1980s the appearance of Canal Plus, a semi-encrypted tv network aimed at a younger hipper audience, opened up a new avenue for sketch comedians, with troupes like Les Nuls and Les Inconnus influenced by British and American comedy (Monty Python, Saturday Night Live). Les Nuls made their name as the house troupe on the unencrypted daily variety programme Nulle Part Ailleurs doing parodies of tv shows, where their stooge was the very anglophile presenter Antoine de Caunes. This format has endured into the 21st century and has been especially fertile for Black and Arab comedians, starting with Jamal Debbouze (known outside France for his turn in Amelie) in the 1990s. Debbouze has set up his own line of comedy clubs which is hugely influential in promoting minority comedians such as Eric and Ramzy and Omar and Fred; since starring in the top-grossing French film Les Intouchables, Omar Sy has displaced Zinedine Zidane and Yannick Noah in the annual poll to name the nation's favourite French person.

And that brings me to my last observation, which is that there's no Footlights type passage to success in France. Apart from perhaps De Caunes i can't think of a posh person who has been successful in comedy in my lifetime, and the trend, present since the 1970s but accelerating, is for comedians to be sort of on the outside looking in at France, French culture and the French language. It's often (too often?) a sympathetic regard, but still, a list of top comedians would have to include in addition to all those mentioned above and not forgetting Devos (Belgium), Gad Elmaleh and Alain Chabat (Jewish North Africans), Michael Youn (Jewish), Elie Semoun (Jewish) and his ex-sidekick Dieudonne (Black African and now of course cancelled), and many more. There is still a lot of testosterone, of course, not least online where the prankster/activist Remi Gaillard represents a different, polemical tradition in French culture (he's a favourite of both the Gilets Jaunes and the Thunberg-ites), one more usually associated with music and journalism, but which also enters the middle-class mainstream as comedy in the form of the chroniqueur, a sort of very concise John Oliver or Jon Stewart who reads out a bitingly satirical text about the news each morning on the radio, in the slot where Brits have a vicar reciting platitudes.

i hope there's something in all that that helps, even if it's just background information.

[ursus arctos]

Brilliant as always, merci mille fois

On the Footlights phenomenon, the US equivalent is membership (and often leadership) of the Harvard Lampoon, with the notable difference that Poonies don't become big comedy stars, but rather have a tremendously oversized impact on comedy writing (the Simpsons writers' room being just one of dozens of examples).

My own experience with them (including my classmate Andy Borowitz) as an undergraduate was less than pleasant.

[wingco]

Thanks again. Really helpful. Laverte, I'm really covering the 20th century to the present day.

[Amor de Cosmos]

One of AdeC jr's closest friends is Serbian. He grew up there during the war, and essentially learned English by watching British comedies, particularly Blackadder. Since then he's been introduced to lot more and has a particular affection for Alexei Sayle and early Lord Sutch. I don't know how much can be drawn from one example but I think walking to school everyday with the possibility you'd find it gone when you arrived, and coming home and wondering if your Dad would be home for dinner ever again must give one a pretty ironical take on life.

[Patrick Thistle]

If you want to watch comedy in an actual British language , there's a long running stand up show on S4C. There's also a lot of humour in Welsh language TV, even the kids stuff that's been translated into English.

The experience of Asterix being translated into English would be worth taking into consideration. Goscinny even said the jokes were funnier in English. There's also the theory that Asterix never really broke in America because it was the French response to an invasive dominating culture.

Another thought is that Jim Henson had to come to the UK to get The Muppet Show made (which is why there were so many British guests on the show - the episode with Bruce Forsyth in the first season is excruciating). He also got at least the first two Muppet movies financed by Lew Grade. There's a warm anarchic streak in the 70s Muppet output that maybe couldn't have happened in America.

Finally, I remember sitting watching 'Allo 'Allo with my relatives in the Faroes and they were all crying with laughter. They were relying on the Danish subtitles.

[Hot Pepsi]

Brilliant as always, merci mille fois

On the Footlights phenomenon, the US equivalent is membership (and often leadership) of the Harvard Lampoon, with the notable difference that Poonies don't become big comedy stars, but rather have a tremendously oversized impact on comedy writing (the Simpsons writers' room being just one of dozens of examples).

My own experience with them (including my classmate Andy Borowitz) as an undergraduate was less than pleasant.

Andy Borowitz isn’t funny, is he?

Harvard Lampoon has produced a fair number of important writers, but maybe not as many in recent years as in the 70s and 80s. I know Colin Jost went to Harvard but I don’t know if he did the Lampoon.

More recently, many American comedic actors and writers have come out of improv schools. That started in Chicago and that’s still a place young people go to learn it, but a lot of people started doing it in LA or New York or other places. I have no idea if improv is a thing anywhere else, English-speaking or otherwise.

We also have a lot of stand-ups as does the rest of the English-speaking world, but I don’t know if that’s popular anywhere else. It was also, originally at least, a Jewish art form.

And now, a lot of young people are skipping all of that and just making their own stuff on YouTube.