Stand-up comedians from Czechia

Czech stand-up never quite settled into the shape the form has elsewhere. A Czech account of the genre says so plainly: performers here often appear under a pseudonym or in costume, and a prepared routine tends to come out looking like a sketch, a slam poem or a song. The confessional first person that carries the form elsewhere is one option among several here, not the default.

The format also arrived late, and by cable. HBO began broadcasting Na stojáka in 2006, Czech Television took the show over afterwards, and a second programme, Comedy Club, followed. That is where the reach came from. Michal Kavalčík came out of Na stojáka not under his own name but as Ruda z Ostravy, a character from Ostrava he then toured the country inside.

The mask has long roots. In 1966 Zdeněk Svěrák, Ladislav Smoljak and Jiří Šebánek invented Jára Cimrman, a universal genius who never existed, and introduced him on the radio through documents recording his discoveries. A year later they opened a theatre for him in the Žižkov district of Prague, where an evening still comes in two halves: a mock scholarly seminar on what the experts have turned up, then a play made out of the findings. In a 2005 television poll for the greatest Czech, the public voted him first and the organisers had to disqualify him for not being real.

Set against that, the plainest act in the country is the one with no costume at all. Tigran Hovakimyan was born in the Armenian Soviet republic and brought to Czechia at the age of six, and he makes his living in Czech, on stage, largely out of what it is to arrive from somewhere else and learn the language well enough to joke in it. Lukáš Pavlásek works the older way, storytelling about ordinary Czech absurdity. The rooms are in Prague and Brno, and in towns the size of Humpolec.