Stand-up comedians from Switzerland

There is no single Swiss audience to play to. German-speaking Switzerland uses dialect in every setting and at every social level, and that dialect sits far enough from Standard German that an interview with a Swiss German speaker shown on German television normally carries subtitles. So the first choice a Swiss comic makes is linguistic, and it fixes the size of the career built on it.

One answer is to stay put. Peach Weber trained as a primary school teacher, came second at a Zürich talent festival in 1976 and has worked in Swiss German ever since, songs and gags for the German-speaking half of the country, filling the Hallenstadion in Zürich without ever needing to be understood in northern Germany.

The second answer is to switch. Hazel Brugger grew up in Dielsdorf outside Zürich and made her name on German television, in Die Anstalt and Neo Magazin Royale, which means writing in Standard German for an audience many times larger than the one at home. The third is to work in French. Thomas Wiesel comes from Lausanne, has his own programme Mauvaise langue on the Swiss broadcaster RTS and has delivered weekly satire on Quotidien on the French channel TMC, with dates in France, Belgium and Quebec.

What the language regions share is an occasion rather than a circuit. The Arosa Humorfestival has run since 1992 in a tent at around two thousand metres above Arosa in the canton of Graubünden, and counts among the more significant Kleinkunst festivals in the German-speaking world. That word is the giveaway. This is small-stage country, where stand-up shares a bill with cabaret, satire and musical comedy instead of pushing them off it, while Geneva and Lausanne hold a separate conversation in another language a train ride away.