They may not be PC but ethnic gags are great comic fodder, writes Louise Schwartzkoff.

Perhaps the monumental sideburns are to blame. Or maybe the coloured silk shirts unbuttoned to the navel. Whatever the reason, the jokes that had us in stitches when Acropolis Now was on television have become a little dated.

In the early 1980s, comedians such as Nick Giannopoulos, George Kapiniaris, Mary Coustas and Simon Palomares introduced Australians to the concept of "wog humour". They took offensive stereotypes, turned them inside-out and laughed at them. They transformed the term "wog" from an insult into an endearment.

Almost 30 years on, Kapiniaris has shaved his sideburns and buttoned his shirt. Even he admits the Wogs Out of Work brand of humour has had its day. "When I see similar material these days it makes me think, 'We used to think this stuff was funny,'" he says.

Nevertheless, there are still plenty of comedians who use their cultural backgrounds to make people laugh. It is no longer just the Spaniards and the Greeks. At the Sydney Comedy Festival, comedians from Egypt to Nigeria, from Lebanon to India will prove that wog humour is alive and well.

"Basically, it's truth comedy," Kapiniaris says. "You write honestly about your experiences at home, at work and in your love life. Then you add to that equation your psycho wog relatives who barge in unannounced and tell you what to do."

Kapiniaris will perform at the Factory Theatre with Waseem Khan and Tahir in a "Bollywog" production called Slumwog Millionaire. In his opinion, comedians who draw on their cultural roots can be classed as wog humorists.

That includes such acts as Akmal Saleh, Aamer Rahman and Nazeem Hussain, along with a few surprising nominations.

"You could say Kath & Kim is a wog show because it is a cultural comedy," he says. "We don't think of it as ethnic humour but take it outside Australia and it is. Dame Edna is the most famous wog humorist of them all. Her flying ducks on the wall are my grandmother's Parthenon dishes. It's the same thing."

Kapiniaris has noticed new forms of comedy stemming from fresher cultural influences. Like immigration patterns, developments in comedy happen in waves. A few decades after their parents arrive in Australia, second- and third-generation migrants start feeling comfortable enough to laugh at their heritage.

"The Lebanese started coming to Australia a few decades after the Greeks and Italians so Lebanese comedians are hot at the moment," he says. "The Indian people are coming into a similar situation and so are the Vietnamese."

While comedians such as Anthony Salame and Anh Do reflect on what it means to have parents who come from somewhere else, their style is different from the one Kapiniaris and his mates pioneered in the 1980s. There is less emphasis on overblown caricatures and funny accents and more on personal stories.

Salame, whose family comes from Lebanon, sees his heritage as "a little bag of tricks that other comics don't have access to."

His comedy festival show at the Factory Theatre will cover a range of subjects including, as usual, a sprinkling of stories about his background. "Seriously, I challenge you to spend a week with my family and not come out of it a comedian," he says.

As a boy, when his classmates teased him for bringing Lebanese bread with olive oil and oregano for lunch, he would tell him he was eating Lebanese vegemite. His Australian friends would look on in disbelief as his mum cooked multiple elaborate courses for their lunch. "When I went to their houses, we ate cheese on toast," he says.

"This stuff is funny because everyone can relate to it. The Anglos love it as much as the wogs because they can relate it to a neighbour or the guy they buy their groceries from. Wherever we come from, we love to have a laugh at ourselves."

Not that wog humour is a uniquely Australian phenomenon. Gina Yashere, from London via Nigeria, is familiar with the concept, though not the terminology. "Wog humour? Wow, that sounds a bit racist. In England that's still an offensive term. Nobody would call it that."

Yashere's comedy draws on her in-between viewpoint as both cultural insider and outsider. At the comedy festival, she will talk about a recent trip to Nigeria to learn about her ancestral roots. "I discovered that my roots were actually in London," she says.

To Yashere, jokes about ethnicity are funny because they show how similar people are, despite their cultural differences. "I get people telling me that their mum is just like my mum but she's Jewish instead of Nigerian," she says. "Everybody wants to know about everyone else but the more you learn the more you realise how similar we are."

Race and ethnicity can be sensitive territory for comedy but you can get away with it if you dish it out to everyone.

"Nobody could accuse me of racism," Salame says. "I'll have a stab at the Lebanese, the Asians, the Indians, the Serbians and the Anglos. Racism is not something you can ever get rid of but if we can learn to laugh at it, the world will be a better place."