It was Friday night, and the Cosmic Comedy club in Berlin was buzzing, with an audience enjoying pizza by the meter and shots of an unidentified pink liquor in tiny plastic glasses.
After a warm-up from an emcee, the crowd applauded and cheered wildly as the Berlin-based comedian Maya Upchurch, a rumpled-looking blonde dressed in all black with cutoff jean shorts, lumbered onto the stage.
“Yes, I’m aware of the fact that I look like Avril Lavigne on meth,” she said in a gruff voice that suggested she’d just woken up.
Upchurch explained that she was half-American and half-Polish, and there were groans from the audience.
“Hey, two negatives make a positive, right?” she joked. She said she’d moved to Berlin three years ago, “mainly for the abortions.” This time the audience howled with laughter.
“Seriously, though: Germany, land of the free, I love it,” she added. “I love that in Berlin people are open. They have 15 sexual orientations and 12 personality disorders to top that off.”
On Europe’s English-language comedy stages, comedians frequently open their sets with three elements: where they’re from, how they got here, and what they think of the locals. Many performers are either short-term expats or long-term immigrants who fit right in with the international, eclectic milieu of late-night clubs where the audiences, too, are exceedingly diverse. Even Germans like it.
“Actually, I think English comedy is a little bit funnier than German comedy,” said Nora Kilroy, a 27-year-old Munich native who was in the Cosmic Comedy audience with her boyfriend and parents. “I know some famous German comedians, and I never really got the vibe. It’s not just because of the comedians, but because of the crowd, because it’s more international.”
The audience for English-language comedy is growing in Europe, in part because European cities are teeming with foreigners who use English as a lingua franca and want to connect through laughter. After the Covid-19 pandemic, many people who had been stuck at home watching Netflix comedy specials and YouTube clips suddenly craved a live experience.
To succeed as an English-language comedian in Berlin, Amsterdam or Barcelona — or in the smaller scenes in Bratislava, Slovakia; Krakow, Poland; or Prague — performers must navigate language barriers, culture clashes and social stereotypes. Jokes that resonate often strike a delicate balance, poking fun at the comedian’s country of origin while gently sending up the customs of their adopted home.
It is not always an easy balancing act. “The rule of thumb is to make fun of your own nationality first,” said Greg Shapiro, a Chicago-born comedian who has been living in the Netherlands since 1994, and who performs English-language improv and stand-up for a living.
“If you make fun of yourself first, you gain this permission to hold up a mirror to Dutch society,” he explained. “Just first show that you’re self-aware.”
Self-awareness, self-deprecation and allowing your own country to be the butt of a joke are all popular strategies for getting laughs, said Chris Doering, who runs Propaganda Comedy, a production company that hosts English-language comedy nights in several European cities.
In Berlin, he said, the audience was mostly “expats, sometimes tourists, but it depends on the type of show, because each venue has a different mix,” adding that “a larger percentage of Germans come out to these shows now.” He estimated that about 20 percent of the audience at Laughing Spree, one of the nights he produces, were native Germans, about double what it was a few years ago.
Berlin is probably the top continental locale for English-language comedy at the moment, with clubs like Cosmic Comedy, Laughing Spree and a bar called Comedy Café Berlin. Boom Chicago, founded 32 years ago in Amsterdam by two Chicagoans and a Dutch businesswoman, is a hub for improv and stand-up. It offers English-language comedy classes that teach amateur comics who then develop their material at least at open stages like Mezrab, De Nieuwe Anita and CREA Amsterdam.
Barcelona’s English comedy scene has grown quickly since 2020, when a small group of American comedians created a pop-up stand-up club in the basement of Pub Limerick, an Irish bar. It later became the Comedy Clubhouse, which is now opening a new multistage venue in Barcelona’s historic center.
Crowd work, the method that comedians and emcees use to get the audience pumped up for their sets, often relies on strategies similar to those the comics use to introduce themselves: asking where attendees are from and how they ended up at the show. This can help reveal what kind of house the comic is playing to — while getting in a few quick roasts or jabs.
“Where are all the dirty foreigners at?” Ronan Brosnan said on a recent Friday night while hosting the Comedy Embassy, a stand-up night at Boom Chicago in Amsterdam. In response, about a third of the audience cheered. “Hear that, Dutch people?” Brosnan said. “That’s the sound of house prices rising.”
The night’s lineup featured three Netherlands-based comedians: Nira Tal, originally from Israel; Sjoerd Scott, whose routine was about how he had both Caribbean and Indian roots; and Rogier Bak, a Dutchman with a flawless American accent.
The long-term host of Comedy Embassy, Matt Castellvi, an American who’s been living in the Netherlands for five years, said that there were so many English comedy clubs in Europe right now that he could tour and perform seven nights a week, sometimes doing two shows a night.
“Pretty much any city with a population over 150,000 in the Netherlands has a comedy night,” said Castellvi. “You can go to Germany, then to Prague, Budapest and Vienna. Because they’re so close to one another, you can hit one city after the other after the other.”
Dharmander Singh, who founded Cosmic Comedy in Berlin, was born in Birmingham, England, and honed his comedy skills in London before moving to Germany in 2008. At the time, Berlin didn’t have much of a stand-up scene in any language, but now houses are often packed.
The presence of so many locals in the audience meant that the easy route of mocking Germans was out of the question, he said. “You might talk about what’s different about living in Germany, like politics, children, drugs and relationships,” he said. “An Italian person’s experience of living in Berlin might be very different from an Indian person’s experience, and you can talk about anything — as long as it’s got the jokes.”
Derek Scott Mitchell, an American comedian who has been living in Amsterdam for a decade, speaks Dutch and is married to a Dutch man. In his English-language sets, he said, he tries to find the funny in the place where cultures collide.
“I never think of what I’m doing as making fun of anybody,” he said. “I am just finding the cultural quirks and playing around with Americanness, Englishness and Dutchness. If someone is the butt of the joke, it’s often an American or an English person.”
Mitchell said he had noticed that his shows often attracted couples in which one person is Dutch and the other is another nationality.
“I’m surprised by how often couples come up after the show and tell me they understand each other better because of my comedy,” he said.
As some professional comedians like Mitchell have seen their audiences grow and the venues for performing expand, amateurs of all nationalities are finding English-language improv classes, basement open mics and smaller stages that have a warm and welcoming “anything goes” vibe.
“The barrier to entry is really low, and it’s less cutthroat than U.S. comedy hot spots,” said Michele Guido, a comedian from Tarrytown, N.Y., who has been living in Berlin since 2012 and performs at the Comedy Café. “It’s really easy to go start a show anywhere or to get stage time, and there’s a real sense of community.”
Building community is also a key component that makes Cosmic Comedy work, said Singh. After the audience had downed the pizzas and shots, he gave them about 20 minutes to mill about and chat before he got things started as the evening’s emcee.
His opening patter was about being a British-born son of Indian immigrants living in Germany. After the 2016 referendum in which Britain voted to leave the European Union, he joked that he was terrified of losing his European residency permit.
“I was like, no, no, no, no, no — don’t send me back,” Singh said. “I don’t want to go back to a third-world country,” he quipped. “This is why my parents left India.”
Next up was the Los Angeles-based comedian Joel Bryant, who said he’d come to Berlin to escape the United States for a while. “It’s weird to run away from a fascist country and come to Germany for peace and solitude,” he mused. “Tables have turned. You guys can hide me for the summer, right? You’ve got an attic somewhere?”
Bryant had performed at a taco shop in Nuremberg the previous night and was leaving for Prague the next day by train. In an interview before he set off, he said the European comedy circuit kept him on his toes.
“It’s so much fun to go in front of an audience of 17 different nationalities, and you have no idea where anyone’s from,” he said. “You have no idea what you’re getting into until you jump onstage in Belgrade, Sarajevo or Lisbon and figure out the common thread that makes everyone laugh.”
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