Stand-up comedians from Brazil

Brazil had famous comedians for half a century before it had stand-up. The oldest people on this page came out of radio, television sketch and character work: Chico Anysio, born in 1931 in Maranguape, wrote and played hundreds of characters for television, and for decades that was what a comedian meant here, not one person alone with a microphone. Stand-up itself arrived in 2005, when Comédia em Pé opened in Rio de Janeiro and Clube da Comédia Stand-Up started a week later in São Paulo, with Rafinha Bastos on its bill.

Stand-up here never had to grow through clubs alone, because by the time it started online video was waiting. Whindersson Nunes was posting from Palmeira do Piauí, a small town in the Northeast, and a parody he uploaded in 2012 reached millions of viewers before he had a live career at all. Júlio Cocielo came through vlogs and sports material, Diogo Defante through absurdist characters and sketch, Maurício Meirelles through Webbullying, a segment built on hijacking other people's social accounts. For many of the names here the stage came second, and the material carries that: written to hold up on a phone as well as in a room.

Where a comedian comes from does real work in Brazilian sets. Thiago Ventura grew up in Taboão da Serra on the edge of São Paulo and keeps the quebrada, the outskirts, at the centre of his shows, accent and references intact. Afonso Padilha works the same ground through family and money. Humor from the Northeast carries its own inheritance: cordel, the rhymed chapbooks hung on strings at markets and recited aloud by the poets who wrote them. Portuguese is the working language of almost everyone here, which sets this comedy apart from the Spanish-language circuit around it, and a few also perform in English, Spanish, French or Italian.