Ismo Leikola

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1:07I really love that I can actually make things that normally are not considered intellectual actually smart.

1:21Ismo Leikola, or simply Ismo, is a Finnish comedian who burst onto the comedy scene in 2002. Back then, he was still a university student studying physics. At the time, stand-up comedy in Finland was barely a thing, almost non-existent, in fact. You are listening to the documentary in the studio from the BBC World Service, the series that delves into the world of artists as they create and develop new work. I'm Olga Smirnova, and in this edition I am following the Finnish comedian Ismo Leikula, a man once officially crowned the funniest person in the world. The title came in 2014, when Istmo won the Global Laugh Factory competition, where audiences and some celebrities cast their votes.

2:19His prize? A US comedy tour the following year, and not long after, he packs his bags and moves to Los Angeles.

2:31But here's the thing. When people think of Finland, they often imagine crystal clear lakes, pristine forests, world-class education. But comedy? That does not usually spring to mind. And yet this Finnish comedian has managed to make millions laugh across the world, in both Finnish and English. How does he do it? I'll be following Ismo as he performs in Europe, in the US and finally back in his native Finland. to discover how his unique brand of humour travels across cultures and languages.

3:11All right, Oslo, are you ready? Please welcome, please welcome all the way from Finland, Istmo! It's June 2025, and Istmo performs in the Norwegian capital, Oslo, in a huge hall attended by thousands of spectators. As Isno emerges on stage, someone in the audience shouts to him in Finnish. Oh, Finnish. Excellent. It often happens when I walk on stage anywhere in the world, somebody yells out random words in Finnish. I sometimes wonder if it happens to other comedians. Like English comedians. Like umbrella.

4:00Ismo's tour is called Wuhu and it lasts for almost the whole of 2025. After Oslo, he returns to Los Angeles, where he now lives.

4:13I am catching up with him over a video call. He's recently moved house and behind him I can see a bare room, white walls and not much else. Were you happy with the Oslo show? Yeah, I was really happy and I got a standing ovation. So that was really awesome. I was actually ad-libbing also. I just added stuff to beats, like made them longer and better. Like I've started improvising more this year, actually. Is this ad-libbing easier because you are more relaxed on stage? I just stepped into some next level. For me, it's definitely that I enjoy being on stage more. I'm more relaxed and I'm more prone to improvise.

4:57And I think I have become more creative on stage this year. So I'm excited about that. If a man and a woman go on a date in America, the things they have to do during the date, completely different things. For example, if there is a door, you know, like a door, Who will open it? Back in Finland, it's whoever is closest.

5:37Whoever happens to be closest to the handle of the door, they will open the door. But in America, no, no, no, it is the man. The man has to open the door. The joke about dating and rules of dating is not new for Ismael, and he has developed it on stage through several performances. Ismael records his shows, and when he feels his ad-libbing and on-stage improvisation have been successful, he reviews the recordings to help him remember the joke and capture its rhythm for future performances.

6:18the giggling on stage some funny noises you make is this a sign that you are having fun on stage sometimes i end up making noises like that just come out of me and sometimes i do it like to feel kind of like when i want to give the crowd a moment to think or i need a moment to think or I think that I don't want to say anything, but also I don't want it to be silent. I sometimes think of them as thinking noises, like... Can you think of anything that didn't go well in the show in Oslo? Maybe the show was a bit too long because I kept adding stuff. So it was like if somebody was holding a pee the whole time, they would suffer.

7:04I don't think the show in Oslo feels too long. It feels like one thought-through performance, partly because of several callbacks which hold it together. A callback is a joke that repeats in the show as a thread. My English is OK. It's fine, but it's not perfect. I still make mistakes all the time, especially with these small, tiny words. I'm sure you struggle with the same thing. It's these small words. In, on, at. I never know. Yeah, I never know which one is the right one. How do you, like, you're in the car, but you're on the bus? How are we supposed to know that? And this is worse. You're in the chair, but you're on the couch.

7:52Why is that different? You're doing the same thing. Just sitting in your living room. But if you're in the other, the small thing is in, but then you're on. In, you're on. At. It's very...

8:12This difficulty of choosing the right preposition, in, on or at, was one of the callbacks in the show in Oslo. Getting a good callback is like hitting a gold mine, it's like a diamond. It really makes the audience feel that the whole show is connected. And often the callbacks are hard, for you to see yourself. Sometimes it needs like another person that, hey, I thought you were going to reference that joke that you did earlier. Ismo is planning to include his in-on-at joke, along with the callbacks associated with it, in his US shows too. He loves to mess with the quirks of the English language from a non-native speaker's point of view.

8:57That's why I and many other non-native speakers totally get his humour. He makes our English learning struggles hilariously relatable. It was like a surprise to me that at some point it turned out that I'm really popular amongst second language English speakers. They get my jokes. There's so many American comedians that they talk fast. They talk about subjects that are weird, like if somebody moved here a few years ago or is listening online from India. Now, Ismo is back home in Los Angeles, doing two shows in local clubs. These are his usual spots, smaller venues where he's performed not too long ago.

9:42The tricky part is making sure he doesn't repeat too many jokes from his previous shows here. The audience might still remember them. And with the current political climate in America, all the division and tension, Does that make life harder for a comedian performing in the US? When I first moved to America, it was actually the election year when I moved. So the whole year of 2016 was the election. And a third of all the comedy shows were about that. And it was like, and then I made this decision that I'm just going to like stay away from politics. And also I don't want to divide the audience.

10:21A cheesy way of saying it that I want my comedy to unite people, not make them fight more.

10:31Ismo has been living and performing in the US for over 10 years. At first, he wasn't sure if his jokes about his native Finland would resonate with American audiences. It was just a few years ago when I realized that I can actually talk about Finland to people who know nothing about Finland and still make it funny. You tease your own compatriots. Yeah, Finnish people can also laugh at themselves pretty well and the Finnish culture. And I like to do them in a way that they can't really argue. So it's like a really, so then, yeah, OK, I guess we are like them. Yeah, I think everybody, even Americans like when I make fun of Americans.

11:09Like, I was surprised a little bit because I was kind of afraid. Can I just go there and do that? But they liked it. And in which language do you write your jokes, in Finnish or English? When I'm writing new jokes, when I'm here, I mostly write them in English. When I'm in Finland, I often write them in Finnish. And then when I look at the ideas and I start to think, what should I put in the set? I basically use the language that the show is in.

11:37Ismo is preparing for a new show in Finland. It's a huge undertaking. It's almost entirely new material. Last year I did a few of these working progress, new joke nights. so I have lots of that stuff from last year but I have to listen to it and figure it out which one to pick and then I have a huge bunch of new ideas that I've written since last summer and I'll probably want to work with somebody to do that like I might do a session with some Finnish comic or a Finnish friend or my ex-wife she's actually really good with jokes we are still good friends so I might actually do a phone call with her a couple of times

12:22It's July and Ismo is about to travel to Finland. On the day before his departure, he sends me a note from the backyard of his place in Los Angeles. I speak Finnish even better than English, way better. So I can talk more easily about subjects that are really hard to explain or really sensitive. Death and life and emotions and those have been really hard to translate to English. No joke is easy. The subject can be easy for people to kind of like, OK, we're talking about traffic. We're talking about relationships. It's kind of like, yeah, but if we're OK, we're talking about death or depression or like that's like, OK, do I want to hear that?

13:05Well, if it's funny enough, yes.

13:10Is the U.S. conceding the green energy race to China? When the Trump administration said it was pulling out of the Paris Agreement for a second time, it seemed like a wholesale withdrawal from the climate change question. All the while, China's becoming a global powerhouse of green technology. What could happen in the long run if the US continues to cede the floor to China on clean energy? Listen to The Global Story on BBC.com or wherever you get your podcasts.

13:44Today we are spending trillions on war and peanuts on peace. With the people shaping our world. You're making decisions that will have long-term consequences for the levels of greenhouse gases in the atmosphere. Wind power in the United States has been subsidised for 33 years. Solar for 25 years. That's enough! The interview from the BBC World Service. Listen now wherever you get your BBC podcasts. Eric Marante had always been a fighter. Age 21, he found himself with a squad stationed on a bridge in Iraq. On the morning of April 21st, 2007, a truck packed with 3 ,000 pounds of explosives was detonated just a few feet below them.

14:30This is a story about a man who turned pain into purpose. Therapy for me is being in the boxing ring. It's just good for your soul, good for your body. This is season four of Legacy. Defiant. Search Defiant Legacy wherever you get your podcasts.

14:51You're listening to the documentary in the studio from the BBC World Service. My name is Olga Smirnova. As Ismo heads to Finland, I'm going there too. I spend every summer there. Half of my family is from Finland. I'm at the train station in Helsinki. I'm just heading up north to Juvaskula to see Ismo's show.

15:26So I'm walking towards the student union building where Ismo is performing today. Students at the moment are on holiday, so there's hardly anyone here on campus. Occasional cyclists dashing in front of me among the pine trees. but a few people have started trickling towards the venue. It's a quite austere-looking building, red brick. This is where it all began for Ismo in early 2000s. This is where he started performing his comedy.

16:38After the show, Ismo sits down with me by the bar in the hall where he's just performed. You may hear some glasses being put away by the bar staff. The crowd seemed really happy with the show, but how does it feel to Ismo? I think it went really good, especially the first half was basically ready. The second half is not completely ready yet. There's been one joke in the show that got especially big laughs. The one about Mummo, a granny in English. People often ask, why do I want to live in America? And I often say that Americans are like, they have more like entrepreneurial spirit. But in Finland, it's kind of like if somebody has a new idea, people are mostly like, nah, why try?

17:22Don't do it. It's not going to work anyway. Kind of like more pessimistic about new ideas. But that's kind of a broader just to set the premise. But then, like here's an example. Like I think Finnish people often don't have a good business inside because there's this saying, if somebody is a really good businessman, people say that, oh, he's the kind of person who would sell their own grandmother. Because that's the same thing we say in Finland, they would sell their own grandmother. And I'm just thinking that I don't think that is, I don't think that's a good business idea. Like, I don't know anybody who is thinking of purchasing a grandmother.

17:58Like, I considered it and I went to the website for selling grandmothers and I was looking at them but I didn't buy it yet because and then I did lots of jokes about like yeah I want something that has low mileage and like a rear-wheel driver like I would I would like to grandmother to have like blue teeth no I mean bluetooth and then lots of silly jokes about like buying a grandmother like from a car website I ask Ismo if there is a go-to approach for making a joke really land best possible joke for me is something that anybody who hears it not only laughs not only feels great and surprised and excited about it but also has a realization that that's something I have never thought it's been kind of in front of my eyes it's been right there I've kind of seen something but I've never realized to put these things together or realize the actual point and it's like a new insight.

18:56So people walk home from that show not only being entertained and laughed and become full of endorphins or whatever, happiness hormones, but also they have new ideas and they maybe see life a little bit differently. Perhaps being an outsider, a Finn living in the US, who also views his own country, Finland, from a distance, helps Ismo find these new angles. For a joke to really land, the delivery has to be right too. Ismo tells me his secret of nailing it. It's a trick he's used since his very first show here at the university's student union. And that was actually the first time when I went on stage in this venue.

19:40I had two thoughts in my head. Slow, go slower, go slow, go slow, go slow, and don't talk when they are laughing. Many of my jokes are also, you need to think them a little bit to get them. Ismo is not too keen on storytelling. I just want to have ideas and jokes. Punchlines, ideas, observations, jokes. That's what I like. I would way rather watch like a one-liner guide, just do one-liner jokes than hear a long story. Can we actually go to backstage? I remembered I have some food there. I realized that I'm actually really hungry. Okay, so we're going to go backstage. I'm going to put this on so it might make some noise.

20:17It's a microwave. Microwave. Something very unhealthy looking at us. While munching on his dinner, Ismo explains to me the kind of comedy he does. Like theoretical comedy. So basically it often starts with an observation, but then I take it further in a way that, well, if that's true, then this should also be true, and then actually this could be true. And then I kind of make theories or like make... I use lots of logic and misunderstanding and deduction and induction. Like, OK, if this is true, then that would lead into this and then this. So it's kind of like creating theories about stuff in a silly way.

20:58That's all. So it starts with an observation. The next day, I meet Ismo at a rather noisy cafe in the centre of Uverskula to see how his everyday observations turn into jokes. I did this joke last night about, like, Finland is full of roadworks in the summer and driving here from Helsinki, I saw like 20 roadworks, but I didn't see anybody working there. Whatever asphalt machine, but it's just there. Okay, so yes, you observe the absence of workers on the road. And what next? Exaggerated maybe, like exaggeration, generalization, even though I did sometimes see somebody working, but no more, so then I just say I never see.

21:48That's exaggeration, but it's kind of true still. And then often I also look for opposites. That's one of my main techniques, is I look for opposites. Like, if this is like this, what's the opposite of this? Or what if it wouldn't be like this? Aha, and so for roadworks, if we go into the opposite, what would be the opposite?

22:12Well, not doing it.

22:27Right, of course, Ismu has been recognizing the burden of celebrity on your shoulders. He is just waving at a lady. Okay. I told you, like if we are outside In Umaskula, we are going to be... Yeah, yeah, yeah. I'm going to be ranking us all the time. That's how I was late to the interview, because so many people stopped me on the way. So, yeah. Yeah, is it pleasing? Do you like this side of things? Yeah, kind of. Oh, our coffee has arrived. Ice cream. Thank you. Kiitos.

23:07Actually, I think that, especially in Finland, I don't really do people watching, people do Ismo watching. It's more like that. I feel the observation is always going the other way around, especially in Finland, because most people know me. And in this town, it's even really most, because I am from here, and I'm like their guy who's in America. In his shows, Ismo often compares life in Finland to life in the US. Okay, here's an observation of this. Finland is closed in July. Nobody is working in July in Finland. Like, zero people. And that's also, it's hard to explain to Americans, because they always work.

23:49But in Finland, like, July, just nobody ever works in July, except, like, people serving us ice cream and me, because I'm doing shows. And is there potential for a joke here?