Stand-up comedians from Cuba
4 comedians
Cuban comedy has a name for its own attitude. Choteo, the habit of refusing to let anything stay solemn, is treated on the island and abroad as part of what makes the humour Cuban, and the craft underneath it is older still: teatro bufo, a musical theatre of stock types drawn from the neighbourhoods of Havana. Guillermo รlvarez Guedes built a career on both, and the street speech he recorded is closer to that theatre than to any club monologue.
On the island the genre has an address. The Centro Promotor del Humor, founded in the mid-1990s under the national council for the performing arts, keeps humorists on its books and runs the meetings they measure themselves at: Aquelarre each July, Satiricรณn in Holguรญn, Cuando el rรญo rรญe in Sancti Spรญritus. Havana and Santiago de Cuba are where most of that work is seen, and vernacular theatre, with its wordplay and its double meanings, is still the frame it is written for.
The names that travelled furthest did their travelling. รlvarez Guedes left in 1960, recorded his first album in San Juan and settled in Miami, where albums and radio hours carried Cuban Spanish to people who were listening from somewhere other than the island. Alexis Valdรฉs was a television actor in Havana, invented the character Cristinito, moved to Spain and worked in stand-up on El Club de la Comedia, then took his comedy to Miami television.
Joey Diaz shows a third route out. Born in Havana and taken to the United States as a small child, he grew up in North Bergen, New Jersey, and works in English, so what is Cuban in his act is biography and temperament rather than language. Between the island and everywhere else, the same comic instinct keeps being exported and keeps being recognisable.
