Jokes don’t travel? Germans aren’t funny? Don’t make me laugh

It’s disconcerting to hear Eddie Izzard, a gifted and thoroughly British comedian, cracking jokes in German. But from the modest stage in Berlin’s basement Imperial Club he has the equally modest crowd laughing within seconds, and he keeps them laughing for 90 minutes.

The faces are delighted and relieved. It is possible, they seem to say, to be simultaneously funny, ironic, sarcastic and absurd in German.

Izzard’s mission: to explode the myth that humour can’t travel and that the German language and culture are the death of comedy. “It’s bullsh*t, and I’m here to change that,” he says. “Comedy is about people, not countries. All countries have humour, though not all people. The Tory Party in England has no sense of humour, for instance.”

For Izzard’s Berlin experiment he asked his linguist brother to translate his recent

Force Majeure

stand-up show into German. Then Izzard set about learning it by heart, a page a day. It’s no mean feat for the 51-year-old, whose last brush with German was two years of lessons in the mid 1970s and who, until now, has never used a script.

“Normally I’m like a bird on stage. The act is in my mind, and I love improvising, but that is beyond my ability here,” he says. “In German I’m more like a swimmer.”

Despite his limitations it’s a delight to watch Izzard swim, not sink, in Berlin with his patter about Charles I setting the trend of wearing wigs made from King Charles spaniels. He sees himself as part of a comedy avant garde that is testing the linguistic limits of comedy.

Michael Mittermeier, a Bavarian comedian, has taken his act in the opposite direction. He delights in subverting no-fun stereotypes with breezy tales of his childhood. “We had a school subject called ‘guilt’ three times a week. On Fridays we had ‘shame’,” Mittermeier told a London audience. “By the time I was 14 I thought I had invaded Poland myself.”

Many arguments are floated to explain why Germans and German are considered unfunny to English native speakers. The British comedian Stuart Lee points to how German has more compound words than homophones, offering fewer options for wordplay. The elastic sentence structure of English, meanwhile, allows comedians to arrange words to hold the punchline until the end of the sentence.

“The German language provides fully functional clarity, English humour thrives on confusion,” he wrote recently in the

Guardian

.

But a stint working in Germany encouraged him to throw away what he calls English-language “comedy crutches” such as linguistic misunderstandings. “I am a better stand-up because of it,” he added. “I try now to write about ideas, that would be funny in any language.”

By different routes, Lee and Izzard argue that funny ideas are the backbone of comedy and are universal, while wordplay is a useful tool but cannot cross borders.

This goes to the heart of a misunderstanding that has prompted German comedy-lovers, crippled by insecurity about their humour, to spend decades importing admired English comedy traditions, such as stand-up, with mixed results.