There’s a “cultural difference”, right here in the USA. Or at least a generational difference. I’m not old enough to have grown up on standup comedians whose routine involved primarily telling one Q&A joke after another. I grew up on conversational, monologue-type comedians (starting with Bill Cosby). As a result, I’ve just never really gotten the point of acts like Bob Hope, who usually sounded to me like he was reciting from a joke book he’d checked out from the library.
This article from Wikipedia seems at first glance to be a fairly well written piece. Oddly, even though it mentions places like Germany and The Netherlands, there is nothing offered about the stand up comedy situration in France.
In the United States it seems what we would call stand up today was strongly influenced by people like Mort Sahl and Lenny Bruce in San Francisco in the 1950’s. The history section of the above mentioned article gives a pretty good idea of how comedians, in the U.S. at least, went from appearing in vaudeville or on the radio to appearing in nightclubs and later comedy clubs.
WAG: at the time, those jokes were probably pretty fresh, but then they got reprinted in a million different joke books which younger folk read before ever seeing the comedian.
Heh. I didn’t mean that literally. Bob Hope had writers coming up with fresh material right up until the end. I just meant that his style, which remained the much the same throughout his career, was reminiscent of reciting from a joke book. Basically a series of jokes following the formula of “straight line” followed by a “punchline”, or alternatively, a series of one-liners. That’s opposed to the “modern” style, with which I’m more familiar, of the comedian relating a number of humorous anecdotes, or jokes that involve a lengthy setup before the punchline. The difference boils down to generating a nearly nonstop series of small laughs from the audience vs generating fewer, but bigger laughs.
By the way, I found a decent article about French comedy.
http://www.diplomatie.gouv.fr/en/article-imprim.php3?id_article=4455
It goes through the major genres and it does talk about performers such as Jamel Debbouze that do shows that are closer to English-language stand-up.
Surely German, being a strongly cased language, allows greater flexibility in word order and emphasis than English?
I’m with you there.
On my TV service (Verizon) I get a “comedy” channel which is like the music-only channels — no video to speak of, just audio. This channel plays samples from various comedians’ albums and concerts: Steve Martin, Lily Tomlin, Cosby, Seinfeld, and so on. You never know what you’re going to get.
Every once in a while they play a Henny Youngman set, and I can barely stand it. He has that same old Vaudeville style as Bob Hope: a stream of short, punchy jokes, reeled off one after another. No stories, no anecdotes, no unifying themes at all — nothing to glue the whole thing together. As you say, just like a joke book, recited out loud.
On the other hand, Stephen Wright and Emo Phillips slay me, and their styles are a bunch of isolated jokes too. So what the hell do I know?