I watched French comics dabble in self-mockery, then switch back to mocking others. Often these attacks aren’t politically correct. At one show, two comedians in a row made fun of dwarves (one joke involved using a Smart car as a hearse). A comic with Chinese roots got a big laugh with his line about the Holocaust: “Six million?” he asks. “In China, that’s a bus accident.”

Many of the new comics are the children of African or Middle Eastern immigrants, populations famously marginalized in France. But there’s little social commentary, in the vein of Americans like Richard Pryor and Chris Rock. Instead, they often mock their own parents’ accents and Old World habits, or go after marginalized groups like the Roma.

These jokes seem to spring from a desire for laughs, not from malice. Stand-up is so new in France, performers are still getting the bad, easy jokes out of their systems. Dieudonné, the Frenchman who made headlines for his anti-Semitic rants, is in a different category: Under a veneer of jokiness, he appears to have a genuine political agenda.

I liked some of the French comics I saw. In his act, Yacine Belhousse jokes that French crime shows are so low-budget, policemen extract a confession by threatening to pinch a suspect on the knee; the suspect responds by threatening to shout. Another suspect strangles himself while reciting the recipe for tiramisu in reverse. “You put it in the refrigerator,” Mr. Belhousse says, clutching his own neck.

After my tour of French comedy clubs, I’m not sure that humor is universal. The compulsion to share your inner neurotic may be mostly American. The French seem content to keep their inner lives private.

But comedy might serve another social purpose here. I saw this at a show by an Iranian-born comedian named Kheiron Tabib. When a woman in the audience left for the restroom, Mr. Tabib said that when she returned he’d say “peanut,” which would be our cue to pretend this was a brilliant punch line. (In fact it was just a random word to tip us off).

When I later told an American friend about this, she said it sounded like a third-grade prank. Perhaps, but in the context it was striking. When Mr. Tabib said “peanut,” the audience first clapped, then gave him a standing ovation. Eventually he dropped to his knees with his arms in the air.