“Half of my family is Jewish, the other half Arab, the last time I visited my uncle he held me hostage for six months...”

As a kid growing up in Berlin, Tomer (that’s with an oh) Sisley dreamed of nothing more than being Burt Lancaster in “Vera Cruz.” “I must have watched that movie at least 200 times, I’m not exaggerating,” drawls Sisley in a perfect English. “I didn’t want to be an actor or anything, I just wanted to be Burt Lancaster in ‘Vera Cruz.’”

The dream was only broken when Sisley began examining the reality of his obsession: “Here I was wanting to be a sheriff like Lancaster, but then I found out that being a sheriff meant being a cop so I quickly realized that wasn’t for me.”

In fact Sisley, now 29, and always on the look out for an angle for a new joke, works something similar into his very funny stand-up act. “My parents wanted me to be an actor but I always wanted to be a doctor,” he says, before adding that his mum and dad just happen to be dermatologists (they really are).

Sisley is that rare thing in France — a stand-up who tells jokes Anglo/American staccato-style as opposed to performing sketch after sketch à la française. A keen student of American stand-ups like Richard Pryor, George Carlin and Jerry Seinfeld... So, it’s hardly surprising to learn that Sisley’s act has gone down a storm abroad.

Last summer he became the first French language stand-up (he moved to France when he was nine) ever to win the Prix de La Révélation at the 21st annual “Just For Laughs” festival in Montreal.

Since then his profile as a stand-up has been gaining ground in here. Jamel, France’s biggest stand-up sensation, picked him to do the opening set of his new one-man show “100% Debbouze,” which played out to packed houses at the Olympia in Paris last month.

Sisley whose laughter count suffered nothing by way of comparison with Jamel’s, did a 20-minute set among which were some inspired jokes about his being half Jewish and half Arab. Jokes like “If I respected all the laws of both my religions, then all I’d be allowed to do is drink a glass of water after sundown on a Wednesday” or “Half of my family is Jewish, the other half Arab, the last time I visited my uncle he held me hostage for six months,” even worked their way into an article about Sisley which appeared in the Nouvel Obs magazine.

“Once I’d hit on the idea of using my background as part of my act the jokes just flowed,” he says. Stand-ups often need someone trusted to try their stuff out on, and Sisley is no exception. He runs a lot of his ideas past Kader Aoun, who also writes for Jamel. In fact it was one of Sisley’s late night sessions with Aoun in a Parisian café that yielded the idea of playing around with his background.

Something that I suggest must be quite a tightrope act to get right. “It is,” he agrees. “It’s very important if you say you’re both Arab and Jewish to be very careful not to make anybody think you prefer one to the other.”

The recent dressing down the French comedian Dieudonné received for some allegedly anti-Semitic jokes he made on national television have served as a salutary reminder that not anything goes; his career has since suffered by consequence, with several upcoming stand-up gigs in the provinces getting cancelled.

Sisley knows a thing or two about respecting various cultures: his grandparents on his father’s side come from Belorussia and Lithuania, and on his mother’s side from Yemen. He is fluent in Hebrew, German, French and English. The latter he learned when he moved with his parents frOm Berlin to the South of France and went to the bi-lingual Sophia Antipolis college near Nice.

It is hard to trace much of a French accent in Sisley’s English, leading me to wonder whether he has ever done any stand-up in that language.

In fact he has. Outside of being the first French comedian ever to win the Prix de la Révélation, he scored a second hit at Montreal by also becoming the first French stand-up in the festival’s history to be asked to perform in English.

“I did three eight-minute slots in English and that was incredibly tough but I was really happy with it.” I wonder aloud if any French stand-up has ever done a full set of an hour or longer in English. Sisley’s right up on the answer: “No, but Eddie Izzard who is English has done entire shows in French and Spanish. I respected him a lot for that, I speak better English than he speaks French but I’m not as courageous as him, not yet. It’s difficult because your mind isn’t free enough, you have to always concentrate on what you’re saying, and how you’re saying it, and on the accent and making yourself clear, it doesn’t really leave you free to improvise. It’s also difficult when someone says something in the audience, you can’t just go and jump on it.”

Sisley is passionate about acting too. For the last eight years he has been studying under Jack Waltzer, the famed American acting teacher who holds classes in Paris as well as London and New York. Sisley’s first regular acting job was a starring role in French TV sitcom “Studio Sud” some seven years ago. Since then he has done a lot of theater as well as appearing in French films like “Absolument Fabuleux,” “Dédales” and “Bedwin Hacker.”

However, there can be no denying that at the moment it’s as a stand-up Sisley stands out from the crowd. Jamel wants him back in June when “100% Debbouze” moves onto the Paris Zenith and prior to that in May he’ll be doing his own one-man show. Watch this space for details.