It’s an article of faith among remainers that Brexit has made the UK a global laughing stock, right? So as I entered the Camden Comedy Club I was expecting the Miguel to be well and truly taken. The event was called Never Mind the Backstop, and the promo material described it as the European Farewell Tour at which a clutch of UK-based European comics “take it upon themselves to say goodbye, just in case”. But that’s not what happened. In fact, with the exception of compere Steve Hili – raised in Malta, educated in Swindon – hardly any of the acts mentioned Brexit all evening.

It was a conspicuous absence, although it took a while to make itself so. The gig (the first of three straddling the supposed Brexit endgame) opens with a warm-up set from Hili, who takes the temperature of the room. Who’s a remainer (almost everyone) and who a Brexiter (one sarcastic voice)? Who’s British (subdued cheer) and who’s European (loud whoops)? In short, the expats are out in force, and Hili is here to make it worth their while: winners of an interval competition are awarded a not-so-bumper Brexit tinned-goods stockpile.

Guileless anti-comedy … Gatis Kandis, who is from Latvia. Photograph: Tristram Kenton/Guardian

It’s sterling work, this, from the MC. But his efforts to crank topicality into the evening are dashed by the four standups on his bill, who have other things to talk about. Sex, in the case of the first act, France’s Arielle Souma, whose set draws on the supposed incongruity of her being simultaneously large, lewd and lecherous. Poultry, in the case of Latvia’s Gatis Kandis, a 2012 Britain’s Got Talent semi-finalist with a lovely guileless line in anti-comedy. The joke is often how duff his gags are – but a tuneless song about his chicken’s birthday contains at least one big and bulletproof laugh-line.

Kandis provides a rare on-topic routine when he asks, “Who likes foreigners?” before telling all those who cheer in response to “Go abroad” – which is, after all, where all the foreigners live. That’s not the only wisecrack here that would go down perfectly well at a Ukip social. Hili’s crowd work includes a fair few jokes about efficient Germans and drug-dealing Colombians, as if to prove that hoary foreigner stereotypes are not the preserve of Brits alone.

Further up the bill, Alice Frick and Luca Cupani do a bit of that, too. Cupani has gags about Italians and organised crime; Frick, who’s from Austria, has one about the unloveliness of the German language – which turns sex into “gender traffic” and nipples into “breast warts”. Nothing wrong with that, of course. It’s hard performing standup in your second language. Why not bag a few cheap laughs about your foreignness, and show yourself to be a good sport at the same time?

‘Large, lewd and lecherous’ … French standup Arielle Souma. Photograph: Tristram Kenton/Guardian

And both can do plenty more besides. Frick has a gag or two about The Sound of Music, and more about being gay in conservative Austria. There’s even – quelle surprise! – a Brexit joke. “Who’s British here?,” she asks, then: “I have to ask that these days, so I know who I can get married to.” Cupani is a former winner (alongside Dylan Moran, Peter Kay and Aisling Bea) of one of UK comedy’s most prestigious contests, So You Think You’re Funny. Tonight, he shows why, with a strong set about his ambition to be pope, and his confusion when a friend suggested the Fukushima nuclear disaster might be God’s (rather extreme) way of telling him not to go to Japan.

That joke gets a Brexit payoff, and elsewhere in the set, Cupani tells us that Britain’s botched exit from the EU “looks like an Italian job” to him – meaning corrupt and incompetent, I think, not something that should be conducted in a red, white and blue Mini Cooper. For an Italian, says Cupani, coming to Britain and witnessing Brexit is like a Brit visiting Naples and being rained on every day. You expect it at home – but not here.

I’d have welcomed more where that came from, and I doubt I was alone. It feels like a missed opportunity, to assemble a bill of big-hitting Euro comics – under the banner Never Mind the Backstop, no less – and not encourage them to address Brexit. And yet Brexit is in the room, all the same. How can it not be, in the British capital three weeks before we leave, in a room full of EU nationals, being entertained by comedians from across the continent who have come here to ply their trade?

Whether or not Brexit ever obliges them to say goodbye, this gig – this uncomplicated fraternal laughing together – is a great advert for the upside of European cohabiting, a great reminder of how much we have in common and how crazy it is to divide us.

• Never Mind the Backstop is at the Frog and Bucket, Manchester, on 27 March, and the Top Secret Comedy Club, London, on 14 April.





