Dua Leo

Dua Leo arrived at stand-up sideways. He had finished an economics degree and was working at a games company when a clip of the comic Pablo Francisco convinced him that one person with a microphone was a whole show. He spent two years reading whatever he could find, filming himself and rewriting before he faced a room, and gave his first performance in a Ho Chi Minh City café in 2009.

For a time he was the only person in Vietnam making a living out of solo comedy, which meant building an audience and a vocabulary at once. He went through Vietnamese comedy and talent contests, reached the semi-final of a national talent show in 2012, and later performed for Vietnamese audiences abroad. His own definition of the craft is blunt: the comic brings the atmosphere of a drinking table onto the stage, and people come to laugh rather than to be taught a lesson.