Stand-up comedians from Venezuela

Most of the Venezuelan stand-up on this page is performed somewhere other than Venezuela. The Caracas open mic circuit that produced the current generation was small and largely underground. Led Varela took a spot on it in 2007 after a friend signed him up, built a name there, wrote for and appeared on the late night programme Chataing TV, and settled in Miami. Nacho Redondo started in 2013, toured a solo show through Argentina, Chile, Colombia, Mexico and Spain, and based himself in Mexico City. Angelo Colina reached the United States in 2018, began at a club in Salt Lake City and now runs Spanish-language rooms in New York, among them the recurring show Espanol Please.

Underneath that departure sits an older tradition of broadcast and theatre humour, and the veterans here come out of it. Laureano Marquez, born in Tenerife and trained as a political scientist, made his name performing satire on the television programme Radio Rochela and writing newspaper columns. Joanna Hausmann stands on the far side of the same split: born in England to Venezuelan parents, she works in English as much as in Spanish, and her comedy explains one culture to another instead of playing to a room that already shares the references.

Spanish is what holds the two halves together. A comic can play Mexico City or Miami without changing a word, and the audience abroad is largely made of people who left for the same reasons the performers did. The material that travels furthest tends to be about the leaving itself, which is an odd inheritance for a scene that began in a bar in Caracas.