A joke is a small agreement between two people who share a language, a set of references and an idea of what is normal. Take one of those away and the joke has to be built again. Over the past year we have interviewed comedians who perform in their second language, comedians who keep two separate acts for two countries, and comedians who are outsiders in the place they grew up. This piece puts what they told us side by side.
There are eleven acts here, from Brazil, Lebanon, France, Costa Rica, India, Canada and the United States. They do not agree on everything. But nearly all of them said the same thing about translation, and it was not what we expected.
Jump to: Performing in a second language · Two languages, two acts · Same language, different comedy · Outsiders at home · The borrowed outsider · What they share · Common questions
Performing in a second language
Jackie Joy: four minutes, three friends, almost no English
Jackie Joy moved from Brazil to Vancouver with very little English. A club near her office offered four minutes of stage time to anyone who brought three people. Her friends asked how she could possibly do it with broken English. She had already handed in a letter saying she was leaving Canada. She did the set, cried afterwards, and went back to her boss to ask if she could stay.
“So comedy made me stay in Canada. Comedy decided my next steps.”
The language problem became the act. Her boss once answered a question with “roger that”, and she spent the day looking for a man called Roger. Years later her English is much better, and that has created a new difficulty: some of her oldest jokes stop working when she pronounces the words correctly. So she keeps the old way of saying them. She also knows that not every laugh is for the joke. Listening back to a set in New York, she heard a couple repeating a word in her accent. “Sometimes people laugh at my jokes. Sometimes they laugh at me. Doesn’t matter. I like the laughs.” Read our interview with Jackie Joy.
Tori Morancay: more comfortable in English than in French
Tori Morancay is French, lives in New York, and did stand-up only in English for three years before trying it in French. She found French harder. “I think everyone has a different personality when they speak another language,” she told us. In English a mistake on stage is forgivable, because everyone can hear it is not her first language. In French she is far more self-conscious about each word.
Her accent was an obstacle at first. She sometimes had to say a line several times before it was understood. She also noticed that the outsider is read differently in different places. Americans know only the clichés about the French. The British, being neighbours, know a little more, and still have their own clichés. Read our interview with Tori Morancay.
John Achkar: taking the accent with him
John Achkar is from Beirut and performs mainly in Arabic. He recorded a special at the Olympia in Paris in front of 2,000 people, which he says was the first time anyone had performed in Arabic on that stage. In 2026 he took an English show to the Edinburgh Fringe, and he was clear that he would not sand anything down for it.
“I want to do the Fringe with my accent, with my Arabic voice. I don’t think anything should be lost in translation.”
What he will not do is translate. Writing in English means writing for a different audience: showing where you come from, explaining why it matters, and still making it something they recognise. “You cannot just translate. So it’s about the writing, and the writing, and the writing, until you feel it works.” Read our interview with John Achkar.
Two languages, two acts
Manu Maciel: the joke arrives in its own language
Manu Maciel performs in English and Portuguese, and is the Portuguese voice of Judy Carter’s comedy teaching. We assumed that meant twice the work. She corrected us: “I rarely translate jokes. The premise usually comes to mind already in the language the joke is going to be developed in.”
The extra work comes afterwards, when a set goes badly. Every comedian asks whether the setup was strong and the punchline right. A bilingual comedian has more questions on top: did they understand what I said, and did my accent spoil that word? When she plays the Netflix Is A Joke festival she carries the Brazilian flag on stage. She says it feels like the Olympics, the only way she can represent her country, since she is terrible at sport. Read our interview with Manu Maciel.
Stephan Dyer: only “culture-proof” jokes cross over
Stephan Dyer was born in Costa Rica, lives in Toronto, and left a senior job at a bank to do comedy in English and Spanish. He has tested translation the hard way. “Many translations bomb. Some jokes simply don’t survive outside their culture.”
His rule now is strict. He translates a joke only if the premise is universal and the structure is strong. He calls those jokes “culture-proof”. Everything else stays in the language it was written in. He also co-founded a bilingual comedy and public speaking school, on the principle that structure can be taught in any language. We have a guide to how a setup and punchline fit together. Read our interview with Stephan Dyer.
Diogo Portugal: famous at home, a beginner abroad
Diogo Portugal helped build stand-up in Brazil, at a time when he had to explain to audiences what stand-up was. In English he starts again from the bottom. He has performed in Tokyo, New York and Miami, and in our conversation an English word escaped him more than once. Even his name needs adjusting: Americans call him Diego, and he lets them. He plans to open a second Instagram account for his English material and thinks he will call it Diego. Read our interview with Diogo Portugal.
Jackie Joy has the same split from the other direction. Her English act is about being an immigrant, so none of it works in Brazil, where, she points out, few people speak English. There she writes new material about her mother and grandmother. She finds that English gets to the point in fewer words, while Portuguese is a language for storytellers.
Same language, different comedy
Brendon Lemon: an American learning to write British jokes
You do not need a second language to be lost in translation. Brendon Lemon is from Detroit, has been doing stand-up since 2002, and found at his first Edinburgh Fringe that the audience did not laugh where Americans did.
“The British don’t laugh at everything. Americans laugh at almost anything.”
His explanation is that Americans reward an interesting angle, while the British want the joke itself: the wordplay, the thing said in a funny way. He borrows a distinction from Stephen Fry. The American comedian stands above the audience and shows them something they had missed. The British comedian stands below them, and life keeps falling on him. So for the 2026 Fringe he wrote a show with a British joke writer, Adele Cliff, who kept handing his material back with the same note: “These aren’t really jokes.” Read our interview with Brendon Lemon.
Three Americans in Edinburgh
Danielle Slaughter, Lauren LoGiudice and Wayne Charles II took a shared show to the same festival with a title that got the insult in first. Its premise is that Americans might in fact be the worst. Being American was the material, and Britain was the test. Charles said he wanted to find out whether he reads as “regional, national or international”. LoGiudice brought jokes about British arrogance and was looking forward to telling them to British faces. She says audiences arrive with a fixed idea of the show and leave having found more common ground than they expected. Read our interview with the trio.
Krystyna Hutchinson, another American at that Fringe, gave us the short version: “They’re very shy, UK audiences.” She told us they needed warming up, and then went with her.
Outsiders at home
Aarushi Agni: finding the rooms that give something back
Aarushi Agni was born in India and grew up in Madison, Wisconsin. Her first audiences were the aunties at Indian parties, who asked her to sing. Her early open mics were a different world: mostly white men, where she was often the only woman and sometimes the only person of colour. She is unsentimental about them. “This is draining my energy. It’s actively taking from me.”
What changed things was finding mics run for queer people and people of colour. Her friendships in comedy came from those rooms, and so did her sense of where it was safe to build. The line she gave us about why she keeps going on stage could stand for everyone in this piece: “The desire to be understood is greater than my fear.” Read our interview with Aarushi Agni.
Paul Elia: when your own community pushes back
Paul Elia is an Iraqi-Assyrian comedian from Detroit whose sketches about the community he grew up in have been watched hundreds of millions of times. The hard audience, for him, was the one closest to home. “In the beginning it was hard. I wanted my community’s approval.” The Chaldean community, he says, can be very protective of its image. Some people were unhappy, and a few went as far as threats.
He did not pull the material. “What I learned is the people who stick around become a much more loyal fanbase than you’d ever get by playing it safe.” Read our interview with Paul Elia. Irene Woo faced a smaller version of the same audience: her first hour is about telling her Chinese father that she had quit Google.
The borrowed outsider
Byron Bertram: the insider who needed an accent
Byron Bertram’s story runs the other way, and it shows what the outsider’s voice is worth. He spent twenty years as a well-regarded comedian in Vancouver, and people still could not remember his name. “I’m just another white guy who’s doing comedy,” he told us. Then he created Sergei Putinski, a newly arrived Russian immigrant with opinions about the West, and his career changed.
Watch Byron Bertram talk about Sergei and twenty years in comedy
The character can say things Bertram cannot, because he has an excuse ready: “I don’t know anything, I’m immigrant.” Russians come to the shows and tell him the accent is right. The comedians above spent years working against that kind of assumption. Bertram found that an audience will give an outsider room that it will not give one of its own. Read our interview with Byron Bertram.
What they share: five rules for comedy in translation
- Write it again. Do not translate it. Achkar, Maciel and Dyer all said this in almost the same words. A joke belongs to the language it was written in. Only the ones Dyer calls “culture-proof” survive the trip.
- Keep the accent. Achkar took his to Edinburgh on purpose. Joy keeps her early mistakes because the jokes need them. The accent tells the audience who is speaking before the first line is finished.
- Use the permission a second language gives you. Morancay is freer in English because mistakes are allowed. Bertram’s character gets away with more because he is assumed not to know better.
- Find the audience that lived it. Joy’s best crowds are Brazilians living in Canada. “Canadians and Americans laugh at the situation, but they didn’t live the situation.” Agni found her footing in rooms run for people like her.
- Trust the story more than the punchline. Achkar again: people now “connect to the story itself, not only to the punchline”. A pun may not cross a border. A father, a breakup or a bad first day at work will.
Several of these comedians also appear in our piece on how comedians turn their worst moments into comedy, which is a close relative of this one. Being misunderstood is its own small disaster, and it makes good material for the same reason.
Common questions about comedy in a second language
Can you do stand-up comedy in a second language?
Yes. Jackie Joy started with almost no English, and Tori Morancay is more comfortable performing in English than in her native French. Both say the first year is mostly about being understood: finding the wording, and repeating a line until it lands. Stage time matters more than fluency.
Do jokes translate between languages?
Mostly they do not. The comedians we spoke to rewrite for each language and each audience. Jokes built on a universal premise and a clear structure have the best chance. Jokes that depend on wordplay or local references usually have to be replaced.
Why do British and American audiences laugh at different things?
Brendon Lemon’s view is that American audiences reward a fresh angle and British audiences want a crafted joke. He also thinks the status is reversed: the American comedian knows more than the room, and the British comedian knows less. Americans who play the Edinburgh Fringe often describe British crowds as quieter at first.
For more conversations like these, see all our comedian interviews and our Edinburgh Fringe coverage.