Stand-up comedians from Turkey

Before anyone here used the word stand-up, there was the meddah: a single storyteller in a coffeehouse, working through a repertory of tales, changing voice for each character, dropping in imitations and jokes about the day and fitting the whole thing to the room in front of him. UNESCO listed the form as intangible heritage in 2008, by which time television had taken most of its audience away. The shape of it did not go anywhere.

Hasan Can Kaya works that shape with the audience doing half the talking. In Konuşanlar, people who bought tickets tell their own stories from the stage while he questions them, interrupts and builds on what they say, and the programme is made of that exchange rather than of written material. It started as video in 2020 and moved to subscription platforms, and it has made crowd work the most visible comic form in the country instead of a warm-up before the material starts.

The generation above came in from other trades and left through the screen. Cem Yılmaz was drawing cartoons for a magazine when he began in 1995, and one of his solo shows was filmed and released in cinemas, a route that barely exists anywhere else. Ata Demirer arrived in the same years. Both became familiar to people who had never bought a ticket to a comedy room, and after them almost nobody new came through for over a decade.

The circuit that exists today was rebuilt on purpose. From 2013 a production house in İstanbul opened its stage to unknown performers with an open microphone night that worked as a school, and a weekly sketch show on national television put the new names in front of numbers no club could gather. Yasemin Sakallıoğlu came up in those years, starting with impersonations of her mother posted online and building an act on family and marriage, and she was the first woman to play stand-up at the Cemil Topuzlu open-air theatre.

Sets are worked in Turkish, and where a voice comes from is part of the joke: an accent carried from Rize or from Diyarbakır reads differently in Ankara or Bursa, and comics lean on that rather than flatten it.