Stand-up comedians from Norway

Norwegian has no spoken standard. Two written norms, Bokmål and Nynorsk, sit above a spoken language nobody is asked to flatten, and dialects are used in parliament and in news readings as freely as at home. That decides how an act sounds here. A comic from Bergen, Trondheim or Stavanger keeps the vowels of home on stage, and the room places them before the first punchline arrives. Where a Norwegian comedian comes from is part of the material, not an accent to apologise for.

Stand-up shares the country with revy, an amateur tradition in which local groups write sketch-and-song shows about the local mayor and the local budget. Professional stand-up grew up beside it rather than out of it, and took a similar shape: the Norwegian default is the touring solo show, a whole evening built by one person and carried to halls around the country, rather than a short club spot. Oslo has Latter at Aker Brygge as the dedicated comedy house, programmed mostly in Norwegian.

Television does the amplifying. Herman Flesvig wrote Førstegangstjenesten for NRK and played its recruits himself, a character comedy set in an army training camp. Vegard Ylvisåker and his brother ran the talk show I kveld med Ylvis on TVNorge, and a throwaway promotional song made for it, The Fox, escaped the country entirely. NRK also runs Komiprisen, which gives prizes to stand-up and revue on the same night, a fair summary of how the two are filed here.

The other way out of a language with few speakers is to drop it. Viggo Venn trained at the French clown school École Philippe Gaulier and built an act that hardly uses words at all, high-visibility vests and a grin, then won Britain's Got Talent with it. Norwegian comedians work in Norwegian and in English, and the English half is less a translation than a different craft: physical, clownish, made to cross a border without luggage.