As one of the founding members of Becomedy - a comedy show production team in the English as well as Italian languages in both Italy and the UK - Tiziano La Bella is a stand up comedian performing professionaly in both languages. He has appeared on Comedy Central Italia and Amazon Prime and only just recently relocated from London back to his home town Rome. Tiziano came to the UK with a clear objective to hone his craft, at a time when there simply wasn’t much stage time for stand up comics - Italy was not yet familiar with the concept of modern stand up comedy and would confuse it with their traditional cabaret. (He definitely did not come for the British weather and sky!)

As a result of the migration of Italians in the UK, Becomedy has been able organise stand up comedy shows in Italian in London and Tiziano has performed more frequently in Italian in recent years, leading to more gigs booked in his native Italy. Tiziano has made use of what he learned from English stand up to shift more focus on performing in Italian and eventually decided to move back as the stand up comedy scene in Italy is now fast growing.

On the eve of his relocation, this podcast invited Tiziano to talk about his accent which carries a hint of Australian English, his creative process in both languages and how he dissect the audience into four different groups. We also talked about the Italian stereotypes and how the Italian accent is the endless bottom of the joke, even though Tiziano does not find doing accents particularly offensive.

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00:46 Intro

04:14 An evolving accent and now a hint of an Aussie accent

08:03 The W-word between British English and Australian English and how Americans and British audiences perceive the C-word differently

10:56 Foreign/minority comedians doing accents on stage?

12:35 Young Italians’ improved English fluency

15:13 Italian stereotypes mined by influencers on social media

16:43 Choosing the funny-sounding words and the formality level of words

20:06 Weird Duolingo scenarios

21:13 Italian immigrants not necessarily able to improve their English fluency

27:05 Forced to use English regularly during Erasmus and starting to perform stand up comedy

29:54 Start of stand up comedy journey and how Tiziano never intended to settle in the UK

32:06 Returning to Italy; shifting to content and performance in Italian

35:19 The reality of living in Roma (Garbage collection) v.s. garbage collection in Taiwan

36:07 “Is this joke about Chinese offensive?”

37:50 Italian accent being the only accent everyone is comfortable with doing

42:10 Not having a stereotypical Italian appearance (based South Italians)

44:23 Differences between performing in different languages to difference crowds

47:47 BeComedy with Italian/English shows in the UK and in Italy

49:17 Tiziano’s social media

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Podcast intro music by @Taigenkawabe