Stand-up comedians from Spain

Stand-up arrived in Spain through television, and in a single year. Paramount Comedy opened a slot for unknown performers writing their own material, and El Club de la Comedia put actors and celebrities on a Canal+ stage with routines of eight to ten minutes, most of them written by professional screenwriters. Both started in 1999, and the second one fixed the local shape of the job: the word here is monologuista, and for a long stretch the person delivering the joke and the person who wrote it were not the same person.

The accent does a lot of the work. Martita de Graná became known from a video she made about her own city, Granada, and performs in a strong Andalusian accent that is part of the material rather than decoration. José Mota works the rural Castilla-La Mancha side of the same habit, and built his following on characters and sketch shows for television, a route that still carries as much weight here as a club set does.

Language splits the circuit as well. Most of this work is in Spanish, Barcelona and Badalona included, and Catalan had to be pushed into rooms that were already programming nights in Spanish and English. El Soterrani was set up in 2017 to put monologues in Catalan on a stage twice a month, and Catalan billing is still a small part of what a Barcelona listing offers.

The widest audiences, though, were not built in theatres at all. AuronPlay, from Badalona, grew his following on YouTube commentary videos and then on Twitch, and that path runs beside the live circuit rather than feeding into it. What travels best from the stage is a hybrid of the two: La Ruina, the live show and podcast Tomàs Fuentes hosts with Ignasi Taltavull, makes its material out of the worst stories the audience is willing to tell, judged on the night, and tours them around the country.