This BSCC award winner pioneered the market for English language stand up comedy aimed at multi-lingual, multi-cultural, international audiences. Having established comedy club culture in Switzerland in 2006 and laundering tons & tons of comedy gold into the joke bank from that time onwards, in 2022/23 International Comedy Club aka Funny Laundry embarked on it’s final year of Funny Laundering there.

Guy Stevens, son of well-known British comedy & character actor Ronnie Stevens, arrived in Switzerland jobless. With decades of experience in show business under his belt he found no interest in his skill sets locally and  decided to create regular, touring comedy club nights as a means to try and make a living in Helvetia and share top quality English language laughs around the country at the same time. Establishing a regular programme of authentic comedy club culture in Switzerland brought something brand new to the entertainment landscape and filled the gap that existed for regular,  professional English language entertainment to cater for both local anglophiles and long and short term international residents alike. Today, stand up club, theatre and arena shows are all in the yearly repertoire of entertainment across the country in all languages of the land, as well as English and other tongues.

From the  first night in Zurich in May 2006 and totalling 676 shows until the last in May 2023, only the very best English speaking comedians were presented, including Eddie Izzard,  Michael McIntyre, Trevor Noah, Dylan Moran, Simon Amstell, Alan Davies, Sarah Millican, Jim Jefferies, Russell Brand, Dara O’Briain, Arthur Smith, Paul Merton’s Impro Chums, Ari Shaffir, Ed Byrne, Russell Howard, Jimmy Carr, Matt Kirshen, Nina Conti, Kevin Bridges, Omid Djalili, Tom Rhodes, Ross Noble, Ardal O’Hanlon, Guy Pratt, Tommy Tiernan, Lucy Porter, Rich Hall, Josh Widdecombe, Daniel Sloss and the legendary punk poet John Cooper Clarke, to name just a few.

A consistent, dedicated spotlight was always given to notable up and coming talent in the English speaking stand up comedy world, especially non-native  English speaking comics, such as Magnus Bendtner, Christian Shulte-Loh, Dag Soras, Francesco di Carlo, Luca Cupani, Sofie Hagen and others, who were championed as part of regular line-ups as early as 2008. With Swiss comics Thomas Wiesel, Noman Hosni and Javier Garcia amongst them.

From the outset an open spot was also made available at regular club nights and for many years this gave the very few that were interested in trying stand up an in-at-the-deep-end experience, sharing the stage with the pro’s and trying out their nascent routines. Funny Laundry/International Comedy Club  nights offered space to all of the beginners that showed a sincere  desire to learn comedy stage craft and take the next potential steps towards a full-time comedy career too. But mainly, open mic participant’s desire was just to have fun, and fun was what they and the very supportive audiences generally had, whenever they bravely stepped-up onto the stage.

Maintaining the highest standards built Funny Laundry/International Comedy Club’s reputation. Keeping those standards high is what set it apart, made it a respected force amongst professional UK, US and international stand up comedy communities, and a truly unique and influential entity in the cultural landscape of Switzerland and Europe as a whole.

However, after striving for years to maintain and develop that quality and reputation more widely, in 2017 a small group of self-professed comedy enthusiasts appeared from nowhere. Forcing themselves onto the stage at the same time as a Swiss Re sponsored ‘British Comedy Night’ was mounted at an established Zurich klein kunst venue, fronted by a Swiss media personality. Very quickly an outsized number of  open mics and ‘comedy nights’ were also established. It became clear that the instigators of these efforts and those organising the instigators, both over time and from a distance und im Schatten as a constant and ever present, were not sincere in their comedic endeavours or professed aims. Disrupting the long established club shows, splitting the limited niche audience for English stand up and forestalling the overarching aim  of a permanent home for international, multilingual stand up comedy at the centre of Europe in Switzerland, were the orders of the day. En masse their efforts succeeded over the ensuing years, with numerous new ‘brands’ also proliferating throughout the Covid pandemic period, despite there being no market demand for them.

One person working alone, isolated and hung out to dry by passive-aggressive, oligopolist entertainment and media industries and mobbed by a small army of stooges and operatives, can only take so much. Especially when their pockets had only just enough in them to survive from their efforts for all that time.  In one of the richest, most expensive and humourless countries in the world.

Funny Laundry & International Comedy Club are currently on  hiatus.

International Comedy Festival is chilling-out and weighing-up its’ options.

Guy Stevens is slowly writing a book – email: funnylaunderer[at]pm[dot]me

Updated September 2025

 

“Seymour” + Red Hot Chili Peppers – Foxy Lady [One Hour with Jonathan Ross – UK C4 – 16th March 1990]