Stand-up comedians from Indonesia

A comedian's home island is usually part of the act. Indonesian is the language every stage in the country shares, but it sits on top of hundreds of local ones, and the accent underneath tends to place a performer within an island or two. Nopek Novian works a thick Javanese dialect and the life of a farmer's son from Madiun. Tretan Muslim turned coming from Bangkalan, on Madura, into his whole billing, and was the first contestant from that island to reach the Kompas TV competition. Raim Laode started in the comedy community in Kendari and brought the speech of Wakatobi, in Southeast Sulawesi, onto stages in Jakarta.

The scene can name the year it began. In 2011 five writers and performers opened a community night at Comedy Cafe in Kemang, South Jakarta, and that September Kompas TV put stand-up on live television as a contest, with Pandji Pragiwaksono and Raditya Dika hosting. Television competition has been the main door in ever since, on Kompas TV and on its rival at Indosiar, and it is where most of the people here were first seen by a national audience.

The two biggest draws on this page arrived another way. Andre Taulany sang for the band Stinky before he became a fixture of sketch shows such as Opera Van Java, a broadcast comedy lineage older than stand-up in this country. Raditya Dika began as a blogger, turned the blog into the book Kambing Jantan and the book into films he starred in himself. The route outward is narrower. Pandji Pragiwaksono made the first world tour by an Indonesian comic, through Singapore, London, Berlin, Guangzhou and Los Angeles, and played to Indonesians living in those cities rather than to local crowds. What makes the material land at home is much of what keeps it there.