Stand-up comedians from Belgium

Belgium runs two comedy industries at the same time, and neither is a translation of the other. Stand-up reached the Dutch speaking half in the late nineties and the French speaking half more than a decade later, so the two sides differ in age, in circuit and in what a career can look like. A performer here chooses an audience by choosing a language, usually without deciding anything, because it is the language they grew up in.

The Dutch speaking half is wired into the Netherlands and inherited its habits: the full evening show, written and rewritten, closer to an authored piece of theatre than to a run of club spots. The oudejaarsconference came across the same wire, an end of year show that takes apart the year just finished, and Michael Van Peel carried the Belgian version through ten editions before handing it on. Humo's Comedy Cup, a talent contest a magazine has run since the late nineties, still sorts the newer acts, and Arnout Van den Bossche is one of the names it produced.

The French speaking half looks to Paris. The way up is a French television slot or a Paris stage, and it is a well used road: Laura Laune won a French talent show with dark humour delivered in an innocent register, and Nawell Madani, raised in Brussels, built her name in the Paris comedy world before bringing it home. What travels is rarely Belgian material. It is a Belgian performer working inside a French market.

Brussels is where the two systems stack on top of each other without mixing much, and where English speaking rooms have appeared for an audience that belongs to neither. The vocabulary gives the split away: absurdist, dark humour and provocateur sit on one side of the line, politiek cabaret, politieke satire and oudejaarsconference on the other, and the words do not cross.