Eddie Izzard's comedy showcase: global gags are a funny business

http://www.theguardian.com/stage/2014/aug/06/eddie-izzard-comedy-sans-frontieres

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"Humour is human; it's not national," says Eddie Izzard at the start of Comedy Sans Frontieres . He's been saying so for a while, and indeed has morphed his career into a one-man mission to demonstrate that the same joke, in multiple languages, can entertain any audience in the world.

In Edinburgh last night, he hosted a gig to prove the point, in which stand-ups from across Europe pitched in with 20-minute sets. It was in many ways an inspiring event. The growing number of standups from non-English-speaking countries is one of the most exciting Fringe developments in recent years; one of them, Hans Teeuwen, remains among the best comic acts I've ever seen. So it's hard not to admire Izzard's hands-across-the-ocean drive to spread the laughter globally and dissolve the barriers between us.

But, the gig highlighted some problems with his globe-hopping comedy conviction. Yes, it showed that France's Yacine Belhousse or Italy's Francesco de Carlo – making their UK debuts this year – can amuse a British audience; they both delivered confident and funny sets. But not the ones they'd deliver in their home countries. In most cases the visiting acts – in adherence to the comedy rule about addressing the elephant in the room – joked first and foremost about their national identity.

Belhousse had a routine about a superhero who amalgamated British stereotypes about the French. Russia's Igor Meerson made jokes about being taught English under Communism – he only knew how to threaten people with transportation to Siberia. Meerson also mocked our British characteristics: we're too polite, we talk about the weather. De Carlo ribbed the audience – in Scotland, remember – about England's Word Cup performance, which hit a bum note.

Izzard introduced Belhousse and De Carlo as surrealists, but they weren't being surrealists here. In front of an audience who didn't know them or their local cultural reference points, and with only 20 minutes to endear themselves, they did the obvious thing. They joked about their imperfect English (a good gag from De Carlo about an Italian friend who died trying to say the word "architecture"), and did observational schtick about cultural/national differences. Only late on in Belhousse and De Carlo's sets did we get a sense of what these comics might be like in front of a home crowd.So: Comedy Sans Frontieres ended up demonstrating (quelle surprise!) that comedy is as often local as pan-global. In a recent interview, Izzard elaborated on his "humour is human" point by saying, "it isn't actually that hard. All you've got do is change the words." But words are important in comedy; often it's the phrasing, the rhythm, the familiarity with how people speak, that make a joke fly. If you remove all that, you end up with good comics such as Belhousse, Meerson and De Carlo using more basic tools instead.

I would agree with Izzard entirely if he said "not all humour is national". His surrealist style clearly has a universal appeal, and good luck to him. His effort to encourage international comedy will make lots of people happy and encourage many to broaden their horizons. But for all that, in an age of globalisation when local distinctions are everywhere being blanded out, I'm perfectly happy that some comedy chooses to remain local – to celebrate, validate, and subvert what's specific to this particular community. Not all artists choose to speak to everyone in the whole world, and they're none the worse for it.