A plagiarism scandal has swept French standup in recent years, with many of its biggest names being accused of having stolen jokes from their British and American counterparts. Some of the examples – posted online by anonymous whistleblower CopyComic – date from 15 years back, before the internet made the exposure of joke theft far more likely. Big-hitters implicated in the scandal included French-Moroccan superstars Jamel Debbouze and Gad Elmaleh, who are said to have ripped off Dave Chappelle and Jerry Seinfeld respectively. Debbouze responded by saying he was inspired by, but did not model himself on, Chappelle; while Elmaleh claimed the accusations, while partly true, had been blown out of proportion.

It’s a story that is, paradoxically, a gift to comedy. The standup Shirley Souagnon refers to it at the start of her Netflix set, joking that she’s going to be performing Chris Rock jokes, the better to preserve her own material’s shelf life. It’s also a story that shores up our Anglo-Saxon sense of comic superiority. It’s an English-language artform, right? And we Brits are uniquely funny, n’est-ce pas? To many of us, the beginning and end of French standup is probably Eddie Izzard’s famous 1990s routine about “le singe” being “dans l’arbre”.

When I began my deep dive into French standup, one of the first acts I watched was Tania Dutel – also on Netflix – addressing the new “for women” Bic pens. It seemed to resemble one of the best-loved English-language routines of the last decade, Bridget Christie’s Bic for Her set. Here they go, I thought, at it again! But any sense of Anglo superiority didn’t survive extended contact with French standup. Yes, it’s a younger artform in France: its boom is often dated to the opening of Debbouze’s Jamel Comedy Club in Paris in the mid-00s. In France, the roots of sketch and character comedy, as well as Jacques Tati-style physical humour, run deeper than those of verbal, conversational standup.

But – using subtitles and my basic grasp of French – I watched a dozen comics from across la Manche for this article. None of them seemed to be trading in someone else’s material. All had something compelling to say. Dutel – described in the French press as “la standuppeuse qui dynamite les tabous féminins” (no translation required) – is no plagiarist. She’s a post-shame, anti-demure female comic in the Fleabag and Amy Schumer vein, albeit beadier and blanker than either. There’s first-base carnal comedy in her Netflix set, including the routine about smear tests and why she doesn’t like men ejaculating on her back. But she brings a winning dryness to it, and to the life experiences of a thirtysomething singleton whose every boyfriend finds Ms Right, she laments, immediately after dumping her.

If the sample available online is representative (and it may not be), there’s no gender bias in French standup. It has some iconic female exponents, including Florence Foresti (playing London’s Hammersmith Apollo this month) and Blanche Gardin, the first female winner of the Molière award for humour. Gardin’s last show, Bonne Nuit, Blanche, was broadcast live from the European theatre in Paris to 337 cinemas nationwide, reaching a total audience of 92,000. And yet, in the English-speaking world, she’s best known as the ex-partner of disgraced US standup Louis CK. How awful, I thought, to discover that your ex-boyfriend did such sordid things. Then I realised that Gardin hooked up with CK after his sexual misconduct came to light.

Facebook Twitter Pinterest Blanche Gardin … subtle pops at #Me Too. Photograph: Tobias Schwarz/AFP via Getty Images

Her love life and her comedy are marching in lock-step, then – because Gardin is renowned (as is France in general) for an ambiguous response to #MeToo. In this, she has no female equivalent in mainstream Anglo comedy where, give or take a few male outriders, the movement has been warmly welcomed.

“We should rejoice,” Gardin told the audience at France’s César awards ceremony in 2018. “From now on, it’s clear, producers are not allowed to rape actresses. But what’s not clear is – do we women have the right to continue to sleep [with men] for roles? Because if not, well – we’ll have to learn our lines and go to auditions, and we don’t have the time, frankly.” She addresses similar concerns on stage, arguing in one routine – about street harassment – that when a woman decorates herself like a Christmas tree: “You have to risk that someone says you’re well decorated. That’s the game.”

On paper, that might look plain reactionary. On stage, it comes across as more thoughtful – as does Gardin’s twisty routine proposing, from a feminist-historical standpoint, that wives should charge their husbands for sex. It’s arch gadfly-ism, in the Sarah Silverman fashion, performed with a winning stillness and control. Gardin’s personal style (she looks like a time traveller from the 1940s) adds to the frisson.

The more French standups you see, the more you realise none of them is trivial. All the acts I watched are social commentators. Of course, there are light-hearted routines – the most famous being Gad Elmaleh’s “Where is Brian?” set-piece. Imagine my surprise to discover that, if you say “Where is Brian?” to a citoyen of France, they’ll instantly reply: “Brian is in the kitchen” – so popular, apparently, is Elmaleh’s riff on English lessons in French schools. “I am traumatised by Brian,” says Elmaleh.

Facebook Twitter Pinterest Big draw … comedy club trailblazer Jamel Debbouze. Photograph: Loïc Venance/AFP via Getty Images

But, Brian aside, French standup does seem less flippant and more politicised than its UK equivalent. It’s no coincidence that one of the icons of the gilets jaunes movement, referenced on many of its placards, is the late comedian Coluche, a working-class insurrectionist who ran for president in 1981. Coluche’s campaign – which at its peak polled support from 16% of the French population – was backed by the satirical magazine Charlie Hebdo. (Coluche, real name Michel Colucci, died in 1986 in a motorbike accident.)

Do you know the difference between theatre and standup? The colour Shirley Souagnon

Charlie Hebdo is itself an icon of French humour – and it’s noticeable that the country’s standups (unlike their Anglo counterparts) refer to themselves as humoristes, implying a kinship with deployers of funny in other media. Charlie Hebdo is an icon of free speech, too, after the terror attack on its office in 2015. Several of the French standup shows I watched addressed terrorism, specifically the attack on Paris’s Bataclan concert hall, and several more broach the strained racial politics of a country pulled between a burgeoning population of colour and Marine Le Pen’s National Front. That’s another salient feature of French standup, at least as viewed through the Netflix prism: it’s strikingly diverse. “Do you know the difference,” Souagnon asks her audience, “between theatre and standup?” Then the lesbian, Franco-Ivorian comic answers her own question: “The colour.”

“Politics has always been present in French humour,” says Kader Aoun, the producer who helped set up Jamel Debbouze’s influential comedy club. “But standup brought forward a whole population left out by the system – the poor, uneducated sons and daughters of immigrants.”

You just can’t ignore the marginalised voices on France’s standup stage, where French-Africans and French-Arabs anatomise contemporary racial and cultural mores: from the relative status of Senegalese and Moroccan identity (Fadily Camara); the question of whether, if your parents are poor, you are automatically poor too (Jason Brokerss); to the notorious work of French comic Dieudonné M’bala M’bala, who has been convicted of hate speech and censured for Holocaust denial.

Facebook Twitter Pinterest Truth to power … Fary Lopes. Photograph: Bertrand Rindoff Petroff/Getty Images

Ouch! It's hard to imagine an Anglo standup going near this material

Then there’s Souagnon’s remarkable routine about the Christian faith of people descended from colonised Africa. Your ancestors were raped in the name of Christianity, she reports telling an audience in Haiti. “Why are you writing ‘Thank you Jesus’ on your taxis? Who writes their rapist’s name on their car?” Ouch. It’s hard to imagine an Anglo standup going near that material – or at least, not as blithely as Souagnon does. But French standups aren’t tiptoeing around 21st-century sensitivities like Brits do. Another rising standup is Fary Lopes, whose parents came from Cape Verde. There are plenty of loose jokes in his Netflix special – about homosexuality, say, and supposedly funny Asian surnames – that would be judged indelicate on this side of the Channel.

Yet Fary is no old-school chauvinist. He’s best known for the row he provoked at last year’s prestigious Molière awards when, presenting a prize, he hailed the audience with the greeting “Salut les blancs!” (Hello, white people!) Some hailed him as a speaker of truth to power; some, as a racist. Either way, the incident, along with a week’s exposure to French standup, gives a vivid impression of an artform doing what it should be doing: heckling complacency and groupthink, picking the scabs off faultlines in the culture – and making people laugh. Perhaps French comedians started out by copying their British and American counterparts. But it looks like they’re now making standup their own.