Stand-up comedians from Greece

Athens carries stand-up room by room. Weekly nights run at Losantzele in Neos Kosmos, Orfeas in Kypseli, Artzentina in Exarchia and the Avaton Theater in Kerameikos, so a comic can play several stages in one week without leaving the city.

The older and richer form is epitheorisi, the Greek revue: a seasonal theatre production of sketches, songs and topical jokes, with a cast, a producer and a run of months behind it. Markos Seferlis has worked mainly in revue since his theatre career began in the winter of 1997, and since 2004 he has taken on the writing, casting, directing and producing of his own shows. Set against that, stand-up is the cheap format, one author and one hour, with no company to pay.

Work in English has a single address. The Athens English Comedy Club, founded in 2019, plays entirely in English at a theatre near Kerameikos and has run line-ups and open mics with comedians from dozens of countries. Greek performers appear on those bills too, Stelios Anatolitis and Xrysa Katsarini among them, so the two languages share people instead of splitting the scene in half.

Work that leaves the country has to pick a language first. Greek-language sets have been played in Edinburgh and London and in European cities with Greek populations, Amsterdam, Stockholm, Berlin and Copenhagen among them, while comics aiming at rooms with no Greek speakers rebuild the hour in English. The difference matters, because the jokes that lean on a local name or a local voice are the first ones to go.