Stand-up comedians from Romania

Romanian stand-up did not come down from a theatre or a television studio. It was put together in a Bucharest cafe by a handful of performers, among them Claudiu Mihail Teohari and Constantin Bojog, and it reached the country in 2006, when recordings of those sets went online and one routine about Romanian swearing was picked up by the national press. What passed for solo comedy before that belonged to revue: Doru Octavian Dumitru wrote and played revue shows in Galați, Constanța and at the Constantin Tănase theatre in Bucharest, evenings of sketches, songs and topical verse rather than one person and a microphone.

The split that followed set the shape of the scene. After a falling out with the cafe in 2009, the same group opened a room of their own on Dacia Boulevard in Bucharest and named it after the street number of the building, the first place in the country given over to stand-up alone. Club nights there mix open mic slots, improvisation and weekend bills, and a comic builds an hour in one fixed room instead of on a touring circuit.

What is unusual about Romania is the short distance between that room and prime time. Mihai Bobonete has played for years in Las Fierbinți, the sitcom running on Pro TV since 2012, and keeps touring solo shows alongside it. Mihai Bendeac sat on the jury of iUmor, a television contest for comic acts, for twelve of its seasons. Cătălin Bordea, Cosmin Nedelcu and Andrei Ciobanu move between club sets, sketch, panel shows and reality formats, and nobody involved treats that as leaving stand-up.

Most of the work is in Romanian and stays close to the ground: family, money, the provinces, the gap between the capital and everywhere else. The comedians here come from Arad, Brașov, Craiova, Suceava and Târgu Jiu as much as from Bucharest, and a regional accent is material rather than something to sand off. A smaller group writes in English for export. Radu Isac, Sergiu Floroaia and Toma Alexandru took a show called Romanians Are Here to the Edinburgh Festival Fringe in 2016, and that is the usual crossing: an act rebuilt in another language, not a home set translated.