Screenwriter and exec producer Chuck Tatham says Canadians make good comedy – and despite popular industry opinion – it travels quite well.

“The whole theory that comedy is a very regional, highly specific thing that is murderously difficult to export is deeply flawed,” Tatham, who is originally from Guelph, ON, tells Playback, ahead of his panel discussion this morning at VIFF’s Film & TV Forum.

As the executive producer of the highly successful sitcom How I Met Your Mother on CBS/City, Tatham, whose credits also include Arrested Development and Less Than Perfect, knows a thing or two about what works on the international comedy stage.

Across eight seasons, HIMYM has averaged around nine million viewers in the U.S., and has been sold to Hungary, the U.K. Japan, Belgium, the Netherlands and France. It’s crewed with people from Turkey, France and Spain, among other regions.

And its chock-full of Canadian comedy.

In a single episode of HIMYM, he’s put Canadian icons Alan Thicke, Geddy Lee, Jason Priestley, Alex Trebek, Steven Page, k.d. Lang, Luc Robitaille and Tim Horton’s donuts on the small screen. And the jokes revolving around the Canadian nationality of character Robin Scherbatsky (played by Canadian actor Cobie Smulders) are a consistent feature of the show.

The ongoing popularity of a show that is written and produced in part by a Canadian, and often features comedy related to it, Tatham says, proves the genre can travel.

Which naturally leads to the other common assumption about Canadian comedy: that its writers have to go to L.A. to be successful.

Increasingly that’s not the case, he says, but if you go, go with a plan.

“Write your ass off in Canada and sharpen your pencils before you come down and start poking around. People just want to see the product,” he says.

When he moved to the U.S. in 1991, he didn’t intend to stay. He and his writing partner, his brother Jamie, gave themselves a two-year timeline, and they got lucky and stayed.

But Tatham says Canadian talent doesn’t have to go south. Canadians are funny, and that translates on screens internationally.

That’s why he, along with four other Canadian scribes – Robert Cohen (The Ben Stiller Show, The Big Bang Theory), Joel Cohen (The Simpsons), Tim Long (The Late Show with David Letterman, The Simpsons) and Dan Signer(A.N.T. Farm, Mr. Young) – launched Maple Gravy this year. Maple Gravy, repped by CAA and Toronto’s A71 productions, is looking to form a collective of Canadian writers, first and foremost, performers and directors with the best material, and get it made on shorter, Tinseltown-style timelines.

Tatham adds that since producing in Canada makes economic sense, Maple Gravy is also looking for “snow boots on the ground” – Canadian-based professionals who can showrun the projects. The longer-term goal is to sell the projects in Canada and internationally.

“I say it’s absurd and obscene that Canadian comedy can’t be as successful as British comedy and Israeli comedy. We know the culture, we’re every bit as talented, it’s time to go for it. And frankly, I’m a little bit tired of people like me having to leave Canada,” he says.