Stand-up comedians from Pakistan

The Pakistani comedian's stage has usually been a theatre hall or a television studio, and most of the audience met the work on tape rather than in the room. Lahore ran on Punjabi stage drama, largely improvised: Amanullah played more than two thousand stage plays across roughly fifty years, working loose around a script, and became the measure everyone after him was held against. Karachi kept a parallel Urdu circuit of comedy plays, recorded and sold, where Shakeel Siddiqui made his name as the character Teeli in Bakra Qiston Pay and Sikandar Sanam built a long catalogue of parodies of popular films.

Television held the writers' half of the trade. Anwar Maqsood wrote sketch comedy and satirical one-act plays in Urdu, for the state broadcaster and for the stage, and Moin Akhter spent decades as a parodist, turning up as a different character in every episode of the talk show Loose Talk while the interviewer stayed the same. That is scripted, produced comedy, nearer to revue than to a club set.

The newer route is video first. Ali Gul Pir came out of stand-up in Karachi and reached a national audience with a comedy song about the sons of landowning families, which travelled online rather than through a broadcaster, and his work moved on into music and voice acting from there.

Urdu and Punjabi are the working languages across all of this, and the same performer crosses between them and into film. The small permanent comedy club has never been the centre of it: the formats that carried Pakistani comedy were built for a hall, a camera or a phone.