Stand-up comedians from Hungary

Hungarian is a Uralic language, unrelated to anything spoken in the countries next door, and that single fact settles the shape of a career here. A comic writing in Hungarian writes for Hungary and for Hungarian speakers just beyond its borders. The home circuit is therefore not a training ground for somewhere bigger; it is the whole job, and it is built to carry a whole job.

That circuit runs through theatres rather than through clubs. Dumaszínház opened in Budapest in 2003 and spread as a franchise, so the same touring comics play ticketed halls and cultural centres in Debrecen, Miskolc and dozens of smaller towns, with numbered seats and a box office. Television scaled it up: Showder Klub, on air since 2008, films sets by members of that company, and its regulars became familiar far outside the capital.

What sits oddly to an outsider is how close the form still is to radio and to print. Rádiókabaré, the Saturday cabaret hour on Kossuth Rádió, did not lose its audience when stand-up arrived; it absorbed the newer people, and those who sell out theatres also write for it. The highest honour in Hungarian humour is the Karinthy Ring, given on the birthday of Karinthy Frigyes, a writer of literary parodies, which tells you that a comic here is judged partly as an author.

Bödőcs Tibor, from Zalaegerszeg, took that ring, published a book of parodies of novelists and then collected a readers' prize for literature, an order of events that reads as ordinary here and would look eccentric almost anywhere else. His register is political and satirical, and so is much of what surrounds him; observational family material exists without setting the tone. Most of this stays in Hungarian. A handful of acts also work in German, the nearest thing the scene has to an export route, and it opens German speaking rooms rather than the larger market lying past them.