International Influences on Alternative Comedy: The Traditions Hiding Inside Your Favourite Comedians

Alternative comedy is usually told as a British and American story, but its DNA is international. Canadian sketch troupes and producers shaped American TV comedy; Eastern European Jewish humour and Soviet-era satire fed its fatalism and deadpan; Dada, Weimar cabaret and the Theatre of the Absurd anticipated the anti-joke; Japanese variety TV gave the West some of its strangest formats; and Australia and New Zealand exported deadpan, musical comedy and the most influential special of the streaming era.

This page traces those influences tradition by tradition, focusing on what each one changed. For a history of the movements themselves, see global alternative comedy movements; for a guide to scenes today, international alt comedy, scene by scene.

Canada: the hidden engine of North American sketch

Canada's influence on American comedy is so large it often goes unnoticed. Lorne Michaels, who created Saturday Night Live in 1975, is from Toronto. Second City's Toronto company produced SCTV (1976–1984), whose fake TV station format, a whole channel of parodies with recurring characters, influenced generations of American sketch writers. Its cast (John Candy, Catherine O'Hara, Eugene Levy, Martin Short, Andrea Martin, Rick Moranis, Dave Thomas, Joe Flaherty) became Hollywood fixtures.

The Kids in the Hall (on TV from 1988) were even more important to alternative comedy. Their sketches were surreal, melancholy and unashamedly odd, with men playing women without mockery and Scott Thompson playing openly gay characters on network TV in the early 1990s. The troupe is a frequently cited touchstone for 1990s American sketch, including the Mr. Show generation.

Canadian stand-ups pushed deadpan to extremes. Norm Macdonald's refusal to play to the room, deliberately long shaggy-dog stories and faux-naive delivery made him a hero of anti-comedy. Tom Green's public-access pranks prefigured a whole genre of awkward real-world comedy, and Nathan Fielder, from Vancouver, took that genre somewhere entirely new with Nathan for You and The Rehearsal. More recently, Mae Martin brought a Canadian-British sensibility to autobiographical TV with Feel Good.

Eastern Europe: fatalism, absurdity and the anekdot

The single biggest foreign influence on American comedy is the humour of Eastern European Jewish immigrants. Yiddish theatre, the Catskills resorts of the Borscht Belt and the vaudeville stage produced the rhythm of American stand-up: the self-deprecation, the kvetching, the setup-punchline engine. Alternative comedy rebelled against the Borscht Belt joke, but it inherited the anxious, self-mocking voice.

A second strand is literary absurdism. Gogol's bureaucratic nightmares, Kafka's deadpan horrors and above all Daniil Kharms, the Soviet writer of the 1930s whose tiny stories set up expectations and then simply stop or collapse into nonsense, read today like anti-comedy decades ahead of time. Kharms died in Soviet custody in 1942; his work circulated privately for years.

Under Soviet censorship, comedy went private. Anekdoty, short shared jokes about leaders, shortages and the absurdity of official life, were a form of truth-telling among people you trusted. That fatalistic, deadpan tone travelled with emigrants. Yakov Smirnoff turned it into the reversal joke that later became an internet meme, and Eugene Mirman, born in Moscow and raised in the US, brought an immigrant's sideways view of American absurdity to the 2000s alt scene. Czechoslovakia's Jára Cimrman, a fictional genius invented in 1966 and treated as real for decades, is an early model of the committed, long-running comic hoax that Andy Kaufman and Nathan Fielder would later explore.

Continental Europe: cabaret, clowns and the absurd

Several European movements laid the foundations for what we now call alternative comedy.

• Dada (Zurich, 1916): nonsense performance as a protest against reason and war. Every anti-joke and every deliberately pointless bit descends, distantly, from the Cabaret Voltaire.
• Karl Valentin (Munich, 1910s–1930s): sketches built on the collapse of logic and language. Brecht worked with him and later developed the idea of "alienation", breaking the audience's immersion so they think about what they're seeing. Anti-comedy, from Andy Kaufman to Stewart Lee, uses a comic version of the same move.
• Jacques Tati (France, 1950s–1960s): near-silent, meticulously staged visual comedy in films like Monsieur Hulot's Holiday. Rowan Atkinson has cited Tati as an influence, and you can see the line to Mr. Bean and to the precise visual gags of later sketch.
• The Theatre of the Absurd (1950s): Samuel Beckett's Waiting for Godot, first staged in French, and Eugène Ionesco's plays turned meaningless repetition, circular dialogue and dread into theatre. Monty Python, Stewart Lee and much of absurdist comedy borrow its structures.
• Dario Fo (Italy): the Nobel-winning satirist whose one-man storytelling shows modelled a political, physical, solo comic theatre.

Japan: formats, structure and endurance

Japan's influence on Western comedy mostly arrived through television formats rather than performers.

• Gaki no Tsukai, the long-running variety show starring the duo Downtown, built games around comedians trying not to laugh while being punished for every slip. One segment became the basis for MTV's Silent Library (2009).
• Takeshi's Castle (1986–1990), Takeshi Kitano's obstacle-course show, was re-edited and given new English commentary in the US as MXC, a cult favourite of the 2000s.
• Documental (2016), Hitoshi Matsumoto's Amazon show in which comedians try to make each other laugh while keeping a straight face, became the format LOL: Last One Laughing, remade in many countries.

The deeper structure is manzai's split between the boke, who says something absurd, and the tsukkomi, who reacts. Western comedy has its own straight man, but Japanese comedy makes the reaction the main event. That idea, that the funniest thing in the room may be the person reacting, is everywhere in modern alternative comedy, from cringe sitcoms to podcasts where a host's exasperation drives the bit. See cultural comedy differences for more on manzai.

Australia and New Zealand: deadpan exports

Australia and New Zealand have punched far above their weight in the streaming era. Flight of the Conchords took Wellington's low-key, self-deprecating musical comedy to HBO in 2007 and showed American audiences a gentler kind of deadpan. Taika Waititi and Jemaine Clement's What We Do in the Shadows turned the mockumentary into a vampire comedy that spawned a long-running US series.

Hannah Gadsby's Nanette (2018) is probably the most influential stand-up special of its decade: an Australian festival hour that questioned the joke form itself and changed how comedians and critics talked about specials. Before that, Barry Humphries' Dame Edna had shown how far a character comedian could commit, and the Australian satirists of The Late Show and The Chaser pioneered stunt-based satire. Aunty Donna's high-energy sketch on Netflix carries the absurdist line forward.

Latin America and Ireland

Spanish-language comedy reaches US alternative comedy mainly through bilingual performers. Roberto Gómez Bolaños' El Chavo del Ocho is a shared childhood reference for many Latino comedians. Julio Torres, who grew up in El Salvador, co-created the largely Spanish-language HBO series Los Espookys (2019–2022) with Ana Fabrega and Fred Armisen, bringing a surreal sensibility that owes as much to Latin American pop culture as to American alt comedy. Argentina's Les Luthiers are a reminder that musical parody can be as intellectual as any concept album.

Irish comedy, often filed under "British", has its own voice: the storytelling of Dave Allen, the surreal farce of Father Ted (written by Irish writers Graham Linehan and Arthur Mathews), Dylan Moran's drunken poetry. Its rhythms run through British alternative comedy and beyond.

What transfers, and what changes

Frequently asked questions

How has Canadian comedy influenced American comedy?

Enormously. Canadian Lorne Michaels created Saturday Night Live, SCTV and The Kids in the Hall set the template for surreal, character-driven sketch, and Canadian comedians from Norm Macdonald to Nathan Fielder shaped American deadpan and anti-comedy.

Has Japanese comedy influenced Western comedy?

Mostly through formats. A Gaki no Tsukai game inspired MTV's Silent Library, Takeshi's Castle was re-edited into the US show MXC, and Documental became the international format LOL: Last One Laughing. The boke-and-tsukkomi double act also parallels the Western straight man.

What does Eastern European humor have to do with alt comedy?

Yiddish and Eastern European Jewish comedy shaped American stand-up from the start, and the absurdist, fatalistic tradition of writers like Gogol, Kafka and Daniil Kharms anticipates the anti-joke. Soviet-era anekdoty showed how comedy works as private truth-telling under censorship.