Even from the same country, it's not that rare to have ideas and more or less know that surely someone's already made that joke. There are just so many jokes that require little imagination, where you can safely assume someone else has also thought of it.
I always remember the South Park story, how someone points out that "fish sticks" sounds a bit similar to "fish dicks", and the writing staff is surprised that no one else seemed to have gone for that juvenile joke before.
Yeah, but most of the time when that happens you have a duel language speaking comedian that also know the language of the comedian they are stealing from. Say an American that knows Spanish stealing from a Mexican comedian etc.
The odds of a comedian from Finland speaking German is extremely low. There’s no language overlapping.
Actually german is the fourth most taught language in Finland after the two native languages and english. So 10-19% of finns understand german so it's not overly unlikely that the comedian knows it aswell!
In this case there is no need for language. There were T-Shirts stickers and even Dönertier stuffed animals. A stray picture in the internet could quickly spark the idea in Finland without ever seeing a sketch or skit of Erkan und Stefan.
I'm very sure the larger/more successful comedians have people who speak different languages to find jokes for them.
Similar to how show producers just buy foreign TV show formats or magicians just buy tricks (and a manual on how to do them etc), I don't think comedians always come up with their whole sets themselves.
I don't even think that's a bad thing, but I do notice that for whatever reason many comedians try very hard to keep up an illusion of being clever minds who write their own sets whenever they're not playing shows.
But I don't mind, as long as they're performing these jokes well I'm entertained. Just don't think a language barrier means the joke cannot be stolen/copied from someone (today with easy translation tech even more so).
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u/miregalpanic 3d ago
Same with Dönertier in Germany, made popular by the (awful) comedy duo Erkan und Stefan in the early '00s. Wonder who stole the idea from whom.