French Comedians Have Been Stealing American Stand-Up Jokes for Decades

Despite originating so many important artistic movements throughout history, the country of France has apparently found stand-up comedy to be too complex a medium to master on their own, so they’ve taken to stealing classic American comedy routines and passing them off as originals. I can’t wait to see their version of “The Bourgeoisie.”

In American comedy culture, joke theft is considered to be a mortal sin that will tank the career of the sinner no matter how popular their Comedy Central sketch show may be. However, over in France, the enforcement of the whole “no plagiarism” rule in comedy is much more relaxed, similarly to how the cultural differences between us lead to very different philosophies on the 40-hour work week, underaged drinking and marital fidelity. 

Six years ago, a bilingual YouTube channel called CopyComic Videos noticed a startling trend in the French comedy scene in which a stand-up will watch an old HBO special from Jerry Seinfeld, Dave Chappelle or Bill Hicks and just, kind of, run it through the old Google translate, sprinkle some Herbes de Provence on it and trot it out onstage as a French original. 

And so, CopyComic Videos posted numerous side-by-side comparisons of those American comics doing their routines and the French copycats shamelessly pretending that they came up with Chappelle’s “sprinkle a little crack on ‘em” routine.

J’accuse!

It’s worth noting that the Frogs who are featured croaking out cribbed comedy routines in the CopyComic Videos compilations aren’t just the kind of garden-variety hack open-micers who can be found copying the homework of A-listers in any American club as well. These are big names with English language Wikipedia pages passing off English punchlines in the language of love. Jamel Debbouze, in particular, is an internationally recognized actor, director and screenwriter whom Americans may remember as the slightly slow grocer’s assistant in Amélie.

While CopyComic Videos chose to let the audience decide whether the startling similarities between some of the most famous American stand-up routines of all time and their inferior French counterparts are coincidences or plagiarism, the likelihood that the most prominent French comics just so happen to be a couple years behind Robin Williams and Kevin Hart every time the Americans nail a bit is a lot lower than the Occam’s razor explanation that French comedians simply assume that their countrymen don’t watch comedy specials from across the Atlantic and have no qualms copying our country’s greatest hits.

Gad Elmaleh, the first comic featured in the video, took offense to the implications of CopyComic Videos’ comparison and sued the channel in 2019 in an attempt to get the videos taken down over copyright infringement, but since he’s not Jerry Seinfeld and the jokes weren’t his, the suit failed. Elmaleh later vaguely admitted of the French approach to comedy, “You hear things and it infuses you. … In what is said to be plagiarism, there is what is fashionable, what we really take, and also the joke that runs, a little easy, that does not belong to anyone.”

Seeing as we can still watch CopyComic Videos’ damning dissection on YouTube, that joke certainly doesn’t belong to Elmaleh.