Stand-up comedians from Vietnam

The first stand-up night in Ho Chi Minh City was held in English. It was staged at the Hard Rock Café in 2011 by Nick Ross, with help from Jonathan Atherton of Comedy Club Asia, and for years the open mics that followed played mainly to an expatriate crowd; Comedy Saigon, run by Ben Betterby, added classes and workshops later. Local performers who came up through those rooms describe going back into their own language as a problem of register rather than of translation. Uy Le, who won an amateur competition there, said material that worked in English turned crude in Vietnamese, and that he found himself softening it to sound appropriate.

Dưa Leo took the opposite route. He worked at it privately for two years, played his first set in a café in 2009, and was described as the only stand-up comedian in the country; his subjects are education, corruption and what can be said out loud, and in 2023 he was fined over something he published online. No institution put him there and none has replaced one since, so the solo form stayed rare.

Most of the names on this page belong to tấu hài instead, the paired sketch-and-patter comedy played on Vietnamese stages and sold on video. Vân Sơn, born in Saigon in 1961, carried that form to California and built a company there that has released dozens of numbered comedy volumes for the overseas audience, and he appeared on Paris By Night. Huỳnh Lập, two generations younger, won the televised contest Cười xuyên Việt in 2015 and turned that into web series on YouTube. Mạc Văn Khoa works the same broadcast and online circuit. Set against all of that, one person and a microphone is the newest thing in the country, and still the smallest.