Stand-up comedians from Peru

Peruvian comedy has run on borrowed voices for decades. What television paid for was impression and sketch, not a person talking about their own week, and Carlos Álvarez is the clearest case. He came up on the sketch show Risas y Salsa on Panamericana Televisión, then spent years fronting El especial del humor with Jorge Benavides, a programme built almost entirely on imitating recognisable public figures, and he later stood as a presidential candidate.

The other Peruvian habit is a character worn full time. Ernesto Pimentel started out in a circus and built la chola Chabuca, an Andean woman in braids and heavy polleras played in drag, and he has fronted a comic musical programme on América Televisión in her voice since 2007. At home the character is treated as an icon of highland women rather than as a joke about them, which is a long way from a comic in jeans describing his own life.

Stand-up itself began in noisy bars in Lima and moved into theatres later. El Club de la Comedia ran for years out of a cast of twelve, four of them on stage each week in shows of nearly two hours, and Jorge Talavera spent three years in that room before taking his first solo show, Evolución, into a university theatre in the city. Ricardo Mendoza was working the same small rooms and television slots long before any of it paid.

What changed the scale was a videocast. Jorge Luna and Ricardo Mendoza began Hablando Huevadas in 2019, a fast, improvised and deliberately crude show recorded for social media, then moved it into Teatro Canout in Lima and bought the building in 2023, so the podcast owns the room it plays. In September 2024 the two of them sold out Madison Square Garden. The order is the reverse of the television era: the audience is assembled online, in Spanish and in Lima slang, and the theatre comes last.