Daisuke Muramoto

Daisuke Muramoto grew up in Ōi, a small town in Fukui Prefecture, and built his career inside the Yoshimoto Kogyo system as one half of Woman Rush Hour, the manzai duo he formed with Nakagawa Paradise in 2008. The pair reached the final of The Manzai before winning it in 2013, and for a while that meant regular television, including a slot on the talk programme ABEMA Prime.

What set Muramoto apart was the subject matter. Japanese manzai rarely touches politics, and he made it the centre of his act, which gradually pulled him away from studio television and toward solo stand-up in Japanese, taken on the road around the country. From 2022 he began putting those recorded sets on his own YouTube channel, and the same year he announced a move to New York to try American stand-up. His path from award-winning duo to independent comic is the subject of the documentary I Am a Comedian, which premiered at the Tokyo International Film Festival.