(Bolding mine)
Without in any way wanting to turn this into a crappy “we did it first” thread, is it really “American Style?”
I’ve always thought of Stand Up as being a descendent of British Music Hall Tradition - although that’s a complete assumption on my part and i’ve never done any reading on the subject.
Yeah, but none of those guys are actually French, are they?
Bosstone, the link in your post refers to an English-speaking comedy club that has never AFAIK had a French act in it’s 9 odd years of existence. I think this is what Eddie means when he says that that there is no stand-up in France (he would have been more correct in saying that the French doesn’t do stand-up).
As jovan said, comedy over here is done differently and can be much more like theater than what most US-dopers would think of being ‘comedy’.
In saying that over the past 5 years I have noticed more and more “stand-up”-type shows which in France. Anthony Kavanagh, a Canadian comedian often appears in Paris with his “One Man Show” and Frank Dubosc, a tv comic, launched a tour last year simply called"Stand-up".
Miller and Ponster, I did catch that, but they are still playing for French audiences, or at least partially-French audiences. That those audiences find them funny says as much as French stand-up comedians actually existing, I should think. (That seems a little convoluted, but I’m not sure how to put it better.)
Also, I’d hoped the rest of that post after the quote would be taken as tongue-in-cheek.
Ceci n’est pas une stand-up
Tongue in cheek? You mean… we’re not getting any cake? 
Actually no, although I can see why you might expect that. The comedians often do a quick “where is everyone from ?” thing when they start to get a feel of who they’re talking to - it usually breaks down as majority Brits, a tie between Americans and Irish, then a scattering of Canadians, Kiwis and Aussies.
Last week for example Reginald D. Hunter asked if there were any French people there - one person out of fifty or so. Trust me, in the eight years I’ve been going to these shows I’m hard pressed to think of a time there were more than three or four French people and those always sitting with a group of English speakers rather than going independently.
The shows are aimed at and marketed for the English speaking expat community. Audiences rarely attain the hundred mark - this is hardly mainstream.
(The same guy organises music gigs where the audiences have a far higher proportion of French which is why the website has a French version.)
Fair enough. The article certainly makes it seem otherwise, but I’ll take your word for it.
I’m so sorry, but we’ve run out of cake. We have plenty of death available though.
Is it chocolate?
It is by chocolate.
Oh, I don’t know- I’m no comedy historian, but any roots American standup would have in common with Europe probably would have been shorn more than a century ago. Henny Yougman and Mort Sahl and Lenny Bruce are pretty different from music hall acts, I think.
They get it. They just don’t want to give us the satisfaction of admitting they actually appreciate something done by an Englishman. 
Joke from the Stewart Lee article:
I just don’t get it. Could someone please explain? Something to do with specialization or unions?
It’s absurdism- this poor bastard has jumped from a plane with a dodgy parachute, and 2/3rds of the way down, he finds someone else inexplicably falling through the air- a repairman! Alas, he doesn’t know how to fix parachutes, only boilers, and therefore the protagonist’s day is unlikely to improve in the immediate future…
Try and imagine it being played out as a Monty Python sketch with Michael Palin and Eric Idle (or John Cleese), if that helps.
Hint: there’s a missing phrase. He bumps into a guy coming up. “Hey, buddy, do you know anything about fixing parachutes?” “Sorry, out of luck. You know anything about fixing boilers?”
OH!
Okay, that’s pretty good if that’s what was meant.
So far as I’m aware, the turning point of stand-up changing it from being jokes and skits into a guy getting up and bitching about life was Lenny Bruce.
That book is held in universal contempt by anyone who has spent more than a couple of days in Japan. What he’s attempting to describe is rakugo, which is essentially a set piece comic monologue/tall tale in which one performer does all the roles.
Just wanted to thank everyone again for contributing. My question was well answered.
I suppose I should have mentioned that that Izzard concert is about ten years old, and of course might be out of date on topics of popular culture. It’s still very surprising to me though that stand-up, as a basic style of comedy, wasn’t well known in France until recently.
Just for the record, I don’t think stand-up, in the strict sense of comedy clubs and Lenny Bruce-style comedians exists outside of the anglosphere. There are plenty of French comedians doing monologues. There are many, many Japanese comedians talking about their crazy lives in a way that might be stand-up-ish, but the presentation format is completely different. Why hasn’t manzai caught on in America? Why aren’t there more English-language comedians doing word play? Each culture has their own humour formats. There’s nothing really special about stand-up.