Stand-up comedians from Austria

Austrian comedy has a house older than the form it plays. The Simpl opened in Vienna in 1911 as a beer cabaret called Simplicissimus and is described as the oldest continuously played cabaret in the world, so a comic walking on there steps onto a stage that predates every club circuit in the country. Kabarett, not the club spot, is still the word for the job, and the word carries a shape with it: an evening written as one piece, with characters, songs and a through line.

That house also produced a form of its own. In a Doppelconference two performers work as a pair, one the clever man and the other the fool, and the clever one sets out to explain something so carefully that the fool can answer as stupidly as possible, which leaves neither of them any wiser and the audience with everything. Karl Farkas and Fritz Grunbaum first played it at the Simpl in 1922, Farkas kept the artistic direction of the room until his death in 1971, and he later moved the two-hander onto television. Michael Niavarani, who had run the place since the nineties, bought it in 2019.

The local signature is a tone rather than a subject. Schmah is the Viennese way of being sarcastic without raising the voice, sharp on the surface and not actually out to draw blood, and the humour built on it runs harsher and more macabre than a German-language audience next door tends to expect. What people here do on stage follows the houses rather than the clubs: cabaret, character comedy, sketch comedy and the television panel show.

Toxische Pommes came in from an angle those rooms did not have. She was born in what is now Croatia and brought to Austria as a small child during the Yugoslav wars, she writes feminist and antiracist satire about the country that took her in, she plays several social milieus in the same hour, and she reached an audience through short videos before she had a stage show at all. The Austrian cabaret prize followed.