Stand-up comedians from France

The room that opened stand-up to France was a television studio. Jamel Debbouze's Jamel Comedy Club, running on Canal+ from 2006 and copied from an American open-stage show, gave each performer five minutes in front of a national audience, and it drew people from outside the theatre schools, often from minority backgrounds. Trappes, Bondy, La Courneuve and Saint-Denis belong to that route as much as any address inside Paris does, and the material that travelled with it, about family, origin and money, reached prime time without waiting for a theatre to approve it.

Solo comedy existed here before that, but it lived in the café-théâtre: small Paris rooms that served drinks while the show ran, built from the late 1960s onward, Café de la Gare and the young Coluche among them. What carried over is the expectation that a comic turns up with a finished piece that has a title and a poster, not a set rebuilt every night. Those pieces get tested and sold in July at the Off festival in Avignon, where programmers come to choose what their theatres will book.

The second way in skips the stage completely. Pierre Croce, Mister V, Roman Doduik and Paul Cabannes built their audiences in short video sketches and came to live work afterwards, which puts the usual order of a comedy career back to front.

The stage keeps what video handles badly. Jeff Panacloc tours a ventriloquist act, Paul Mirabel works slowly and gently through a story, and Redouane Bougheraba makes the Marseille accent and an open argument with the room the point of the whole evening. Nearly all of this is performed in French, on a circuit running from Lille and Strasbourg to Bordeaux, Lyon, Montpellier and Marseille, with a smaller group working in Arabic, Spanish, Italian, German, Hebrew or English. Birth years run from 1922 to 1998, far enough apart that the oldest learned the job in a room with a bar in it and the youngest learned it with a phone.