Funny foreigners

Comedy in a foreign language is a tricky business. Take this Italian joke. "Perche' gli inglesi portano i gemelli?" it begins. Even if you know that this translates as, "Why do the English wear shirt cuffs?" you still might not understand the punchline: "Perche' hanno paura che i francesi gli entrino nella Manica!" This means: "For fear that the French enter the Channel!" It's a play on words: the Italian for English Channel is "sleeve". But by the time you've explained that, well, the moment has passed. And yet dozens of standups from around the world are in Edinburgh this year, here to perform comedy in a language – English – that is not their own. In this most verbal of artforms, one that's intimately bound up with cultural references, identity and wordplay, can they possibly succeed? And if so, how?

Some of these comedians are based in the UK, and have only ever performed in English; some started as standups in Sweden, Holland or Norway and are now hoping to find a bigger market. Not that money is the only reason to perform in English. Acts such as Hans Teeuwen, from the Netherlands, and Sweden's Magnus Betnér are superstars back home, now seeking to escape fame and hone their skills in a more competitive environment. Coming to the UK lets them wring more life out of material that feels overfamiliar in their own country.

Others were inspired to take up standup only after coming to the UK. The Italian comic Giacinto Palmieri has never actually performed in Italian. "My niche is that not only can I show British culture in an unfamiliar way, but I can do the same with the language. I can show how absurd English idioms sound to the Italian ear." These include "Bob's your uncle", which apparently derives from the nepotistic practices of 1880s PM Robert Cecil. Palmieri proposes an Italian alternative: "Silvio fucked your daughter." He also reveals that the Italian version of "Have your cake and eat it" is: "Have your wife drunk and the bottle still full."

In Italy, says Palmieri, the culture is visual, the comedy more physical – think Roberto Benigni – and deadpan humour is known as umorismo inglese. To Palmieri, the English language is uniquely suitable for verbal humour. "It's very idiomatic, it contains a lot of polysemantic or homophonic words," he tells me (in his second language!), "which you can play with a lot. The same things that make English difficult to learn are what make it good for comedy." Read the article in full on The Guardian