Stand-up comedians from Tunisia

The best known solo comic in Tunisia arrived from the ballet. Lotfi Abdelli danced at the conservatory in Tunis and in the company of the national theatre before he built the one man shows that made his name, among them Made in Tunisia, and that route through dance and drama shaped what comedy looks like here. The standard unit is a whole evening carried by one performer on a theatre stage, with movement and character work in it, rather than a tight ten minutes in a basement.

Language decides how far such an evening can travel. Tunisians talk in Derja, which sits far enough from written Arabic to be a separate thing to learn, and which other Arabic speakers follow unevenly: Algerian, Libyan and Moroccan listeners get it, while audiences raised on Egyptian, Levantine or Gulf speech mostly do not. French runs through the same sentences, and Abdelli works in French as well as Arabic, which is one way of reaching a room that Derja alone would not reach.

A stage that size is also public in a way a club never is. One of the solo shows by Abdelli was called off in 2012 after protesters occupied the hall booked for it, and the same performer has a best actor prize from the Carthage Film Festival on the other side of his record. Bassem Hamraoui, the most watched Tunisian name here, works where the largest audiences are anyway: he directs comedy series for television, and the screen is where a Tunisian comic performer is most likely to be met.