News Story
Fresh off the back of appearances on Conan and The Late Late Show, Finnish comedian ISMO brings his sharp observational humour and unique perspective on language, culture, and everyday life to Town Hall on Tuesday 16 September!
Known for his clever wordplay and hilarious takes on English quirks, ISMO’s comedy resonates with audiences worldwide.
“What I'm going for is finding the hidden obvious, something that's been hidden in plain sight,” he says. “Instead of finding the most bizarre things in the world, I find the most obvious and talk about them in a way that's very uncommon.”
ISMO: Woo Hoo! World Tour
Tuesday 16 September | Town Hall | 8PM
He notices weird quirks of humanity every day and finds his material via a philosophical process turning them into witty, insightful storytelling that transforms ordinary situations into laugh-out-loud moments.
- Leikola uses his outsider's point of view to find humour in ordinary things.
- His humour often has philosophical and science-based subtext or analyses the Finnish and English languages.
- He has mentioned that he is interested in the great questions of life as well as logic, the absence of logic, and the dismantling of concepts.
- He started performing in English in 2005 while visiting the UK. In 2007 and 2008, Leikola performed at the Edinburgh Festival Fringe in Edinburgh, Scotland.
- In 2019, Leikola started to collaborate with Merriam-Webster's dictionary, creating a series of videos for them about the quirks of the English language.
- In October 2014, Leikola won the first "Funniest Person In The World" competition organized by the Laugh Factory. The winner was selected based on an online voting system and celebrity guests. He received almost 160,000 online votes.
“I really enjoy questioning things in a non-comedic way. Questioning them because they interest me. Asking questions like, 'why is this like this?' or 'how did this happen?'” he says. “I think way deeper into things than you would imagine hearing the material. Sometimes it's just something funny or silly. Sometimes I stumble into jokes while trying to figure out the meaning of life. It's kind of happens by accident.”
Although ISMO recalls picking up a fondness for wordplay and parody from the pages of Mad magazine, which he read as a youth in the Finnish city of Jyväskylä, his early exposure to stand-up was limited to the comedy club bookends on episodes of “Seinfeld.” It wasn’t until he was a physics and chemistry student at the University of Jyväskylä that he was introduced to live stand-up at the campus bar.
“There are not many comedians from Finland but there are many comedians in Finland,” he says. “If you would search in Finnish — if you typed ‘Finnish comedian’ in Finnish — there would be lots more people. There may be a few others doing it in English somewhere, but I think I’m the only one who moved to America and doing it here.”
“I was playing around with doing the English stuff earlier and I did lots of stuff in the UK. But America just seemed so far away. It seemed impossible to just go to America. Then the opportunity opened when I did the competition in L.A. Everything opened and suddenly I had contacts here and then it was a possibility. It was a no-brainer. If I don’t see how it goes, I’m going to regret it for the rest of my life. I didn’t even think of it as a choice. It was obvious. It was like destiny.”
“I write a lot any way,” he says. “And now when I’m here I write mostly in English and stuff about America and being here. So many jokes don’t work in both languages. Sometimes we translate it. But at least half doesn’t translate at all because it is so much language-based. I like to play with the language a lot.”
“Crafting the order of the words to reveal the joke in the best way. That can be difficult,” ISMO says. “English has, like, a million words — way more words than any other language. I don’t know all of the subtle double meanings of stuff, or there’s lots of synonyms for a word and I have to choose the right one. Often I do have to ask people, ‘Why is this not working? Why are people not getting this?’”
“But timing and rhythm, that’s always been really natural to me with comedy,” he adds. “Luckily, that’s kind of the same in both languages.”
“When you start thinking about it,” he says, “It’s kind of crazy that you can come from a small country with a completely different language and still do all this — and hopefully more.”
Don’t miss this night of smart and side-splitting comedy withISMO: Woo Hoo! World Tour on Tuesday 16 September at Town Hall.
