Stand-up comedians from Argentina

Stand-up in Argentina has a starting date and a much older habit behind it. The circuit is usually dated to 2001, when Alejandro Angelini, Diego Wainstein and two others put on En pie de risa in a small Buenos Aires room and, as Angelini put it, ended the mother-in-law jokes and started talking about real life. The format was the import; the audience was already trained, because the café concert basements of the 1970s had spent years selling tickets to one person with a microphone.

The circuit that grew from it belongs to bars, not theatres. Local producers call stand-up a bar genre, since it needs the room close enough to answer back, and shows scatter across cafés, cultural centres and back rooms that nobody officially counts. Paseo La Plaza is the address comics aim at, while the work feeding it stays informal and nearly invisible to theatre awards.

The older line of solo performance never went away, and much Argentine comedy still happens outside the stand-up rooms. Luis Landriscina built a career on unhurried country tales from Chaco, taking the newcomer prize at the Cosquín folk festival in 1964, and said he leans to the story, not the joke. Mex Urtizberea is a musician and television host whose humour lives inside the programmes he presents. Martín Bossi fills revue houses with impressions and moves to Mar del Plata for the summer season, where humour leads the box office. Agustín Aristarán works as Soy Rada, with magic and songs folded into the act.

Video moved the map more than the clubs did. Damián Kuc stayed in Resistencia, the same province Landriscina came from, and built a following on Historias Innecesarias, storytelling videos that run up to half an hour on a crime case, before taking the material on tour. Working in Spanish puts a continent within reach without translation. Luciano Mellera, working since 2008, filled the Luna Park arena with Lucas Lauriente, put Infantiloide on Netflix in 2018, and says the crowds he plays to in Spain are Spanish, not expatriate. Jorge Alís went the other way, settling in Chile in 1997 and making his name there.