Stand-up comedians from Colombia

Colombian comedy has a school, and the school is a television programme. Sábados Felices has gone out on Caracol Televisión since 1972 and holds a certificate from Guinness World Records as the longest-running comedy show on television anywhere. Its engine is a joke-telling contest, Los CuentaChistes, in which unknown comics turn up with material and compete, so the programme works as a recruiting office as much as a broadcast.

The solo hour arrived separately and late. Andrés López first played La pelota de letras in a bar in Bogotá in 2004, a monologue about how four generations of Colombians grew up, and the DVD that followed became the best-selling one in the country and travelled to Spain, the United States, Canada and much of Latin America. It is treated inside the scene as the founding stone, the proof that one person with no cast and no sketch could hold a paying room.

Character work never went away, and it is usually regional. Dany Alejandro Hoyos plays Suso el Paspi, a shoeshine man who interviews politicians, athletes and celebrities in the paisa manner of Antioquia, and the show built around the character started on city television in Medellín before the national channels picked it up. In this country an accent is not decoration: a joke written in Bogotá often has to be refitted for the coast.

Under those names is a circuit that had to be built by hand. Open mics in Bogotá grew out of a park and a handful of bars, with comics running weekly nights at rooms like El Rembrandt and Backstage while the established acts charged fees a newcomer could not imagine. The argument inside the scene is with television itself, and specifically with the safe, recreational kind of funny that the broadcast tradition rewards.