Stand-up comedians from Russia

Russian comedy spent most of a century keeping the writer and the performer apart. A satirical monologue on the Soviet stage was a text commissioned from an author and then delivered by an actor, and Gennady Khazanov built a career on exactly that: the routines he is remembered for, a culinary school student and a parrot who cannot stop telling the truth, were written for him by Lion Izmailov, Iurii Volovich and Arkady Khait. The performer was an interpreter with a script rather than a comic working out his own material.

The other old track was a team sport. KVN put student teams on television from 1961 to trade prepared sketches and fast answers in front of a jury, and it grew into thousands of teams across a hundred-odd cities, which made it the national audition hall. Pavel Volya played KVN before he became a resident of Comedy Club, the TNT programme that from 2005 put a fixed cast of comics in front of a club audience with monologues and sketches, and that was copied into neighbouring countries that share the language.

Stand-up in the strict sense, one person performing what they wrote, is the youngest of the three, and it grew on video rather than on air. Danila Poperechny moved from cartoons to stand-up on a channel of his own and has put nine specials out online. Slava Komissarenko has been working since 2008 in autobiographical, observational and political material, which is close to the standard mix: parody, impressionism, political satire and social commentary sit next to one another instead of in separate scenes.

Language does more work here than geography. Performers work in Russian, and the formats built around them travelled to audiences who already speak it rather than into translation, which is the comfort of the trade and its ceiling at once: a full room wherever the language is spoken, and a set whose wordplay does not survive a subtitle. Moscow and Saint Petersburg are where most of these names come from, and the audience is wider than the map.