November Roundup

Standup Comedy, A Belgrade Memoir, Soylu's Rage

The New Comedians

Whisper it, but Turkey is experiencing something of a comedy renaissance. Much of this seems to be in stand up and new media, and unlike comedians in the 2010s, these performers aren’t afraid to get political from time to time.

You may doubt my objectivity, but I think that Turkey is an extraordinarily funny country. We have a wonderful culture of weekly comic magazines, lots of sketch troops and a lively film and TV industry churning out comedies and sitcoms. In the 1990s, when I was growing up, it was common to see a lot of political comedy in these venues. The TV show Olacak O Kadar, where a troop of immensely talented actors made fun of politicians across the spectrum, was a favorite in our home.

Things changed in the 2000s. Politics became a lot more serious. The biggest comedians of the times, like Cem Yılmaz, Yılmaz Erdoğan and Beyazıt Öztürk steered clear of politics all together. The weekly magazines like Penguen and Uykusuz still got into politics, as did Zaytung, Turkey’s equivalent of The Onion, but even they had to tone it down.

Things are changing now. There’s a standup scene growing around platforms like the Beşiktaş Culture Center (BKM) and TuzBiber, as well as streaming services like Gain. It’s nearly all comedians in their 20s and 30s, mostly guys, but plenty of women too. It’s not that they explicitly do political comedy, but you do get a stronger political vibe from them. The older generation was ultimately deferential to religious and governmental authority. The new comics are more irreverent, they’re closer to daily life, and they’re willing to cut closer to the bone. I also think they’re more serious about craft. I think we’re going to have a much broader spectrum of very original comedians in the coming years.

I’m going to write a lot more about this in dedicated posts. For now, I’ll leave you with a few clips below. It’s not really possible to translate these, but I’ve done my best to give you a sense of what’s happening in each.

Salih Traş, who’s from Ankara (and hilariously looks like an AK Party politicians from Ankara,) talks about what it was like when his mother found out that he’s doing standup. “What if our relatives see you?” she says in the bit, and Traş says “mom it’s not like I’m performing at a pavyon” [a kind of seedy night club, especially prevalent in Ankara] “so how would our relatives even know?”

As far as I know, there weren’t explicitly Kurdish comedians before, meaning that there weren’t people who made jokes about being Kurdish, or had Kurdish accents. Now there’s a few. Yusuf Bilal is one of the better known, and he impersonates a Kurdish ghost in this clip.

He ends with a bit where he’s impersonating a agnostic person someone who’s died and is negotiating with the angels in araf (the Muslim version of purgatory, but nicer). He eventually says he’d like to stay in araf. “I’m Zaza anyways!” he says, “we’re used to being in between things - neither Kurdish nor Turkish.”

Seda Yüz deconstructs some popular expletives for the misogynistic assumptions they entail. It’s absolutely devastating and gloriously promiscuous. YouTube won’t let you see it unless you’re over 18. I’m tempted to do a sentence-by-sentence analysis of this, but really probably shouldn’t.

More to come on comedy!

There’s a couple of other topics below:

• A review of Ambassador Süha Umar’s memoir of his time in Belgrade.

• A commentary on a news story involving Minister of Interior Süleyman Soylu, the Istanbul police chief and an organized crime ring.