Stand-up comedians from Italy

In Italy, getting seen has usually meant arriving with a character, not a microphone and a life story. The pipeline ran through two rooms in Milan. The Derby Club booked jazz and comics from 1962 until it shut in 1985, and Zelig opened weeks later, in 1986, lending its name to a Mediaset programme that moved the cabaret stage onto national television. Some of the best known came that way: Checco Zalone was a fixture of the Zelig editions before his films began setting Italian box office records, Federico Basso worked his everyday-life material there, and Max Angioni arrived from a talent contest with a character of his own.

The other route ignores the national channels and stays in a dialect. Uccio De Santis performs in Apulian and built Mudu, short sketch films for the regional broadcaster Telenorba that later reached Rai, and never moved his comedy away from Bari. Natalino Balasso writes in Venetian and has put Shakespeare into it. The stage name Checco Zalone is itself a Barese phrase, roughly what a boor. Southern comedy had its own showcase in Made in Sud, put together in Naples, where the humour came with the accent. A comedian can draw a huge audience here and still work in a speech a listener in Turin would want subtitles for.

The solo set, one person talking about a life, is the newest layer. Italy held its first open mic in 2014, and Comedy Central gave it a screen with Natural Born Comedians and Stand Up Comedy, where much of this generation was first seen. Luca Ravenna, who names Anglo-Saxon comics as his models, opened his first solo show in 2018. Eleazaro Rossi came off that same stage and wrote monologues for the satirical programme Le Iene. Angelo Duro turned provocation into theatre tours and then cinema. Frank Matano used another door: prank videos posted online from 2007, before any network called.

Theatre holds it together. Enrico Brignano trained in the workshop of Gigi Proietti and builds the one-man show, an evening written for a full house rather than a set list for a club. Most of this work is in Italian, dialect narrows it again, and little travels. Matano, whose mother is American, is the rare name here who also works in English.