Stand-up comedians from Slovenia

Slovenia met stand-up late and in one go. The first home comedy contest and the first stand-up festival both happened in 2008, and that festival, played in the courtyard of the castle above Ljubljana, has been the central date of the comic year ever since. Tin Vodopivec won the contest and organised the festival, which says most of what needs saying about how few people were doing this at the time.

No one arrived through a club, because there were none. Vid Valič came out of the school improvisation league, spent years in an improv theatre company and only then stood alone with a microphone, and that background is audible: a lot of Slovenian comedy is built on characters and voices, with a scene partner implied where there is none. Marko Žerjal came the other way, leaving a programming job for a comic video series he started posting in 2015, and moved onto stages once the videos had found people.

A set written in Slovene reaches the people who speak Slovene, and no further. That ceiling is why the widest audience belongs to somebody who is not a club comic at all. Klemen Slakonja trained as an actor and works in impersonation and musical parody, and his videos of internationally known public figures carried far past the country, because a recognisable face and a tune need no translation. Lucija Ćirović works a similar register on television.

What stands in for a circuit is one association: it runs the festival, a winter edition of it in other towns, a stand-up school and club nights, with the same few organisers behind each. Most of the people here also work in television, writing for a weekly satire show, hosting a talent format or acting in sketch, so stand-up is one job among several rather than a trade of its own. That is what a young scene in a small language looks like from the inside.