Groningen Stand-Up Comedy Culture: G-Spot Comedy Club Under the Lens
- Anna Milovanovic
- Oct 1, 2024
- 4 min read
The G-Spot Comedy Club will showcase eight comedians tomorrow night at Usva, the Cultural Student Centre of the University of Groningen.
“War: any, Russia-Ukraine, Israel-Palestine. Puff Daddy’s situation. Things like that. Whatever’s available, we talk about it,” Valerio Pizzonia, emcee of G-Spot Comedy, told The Glass Room. He organizes the stand-up comedy show once a month.
Both English-language and Dutch-language stand-up is growing in the city. G-Spot Comedy opened about two-and-a-half years ago, expanding on the talent showcased at OMG (Open Mic Groningen), he said.
“We have eight comedians part-time, they do eight minutes each. It’s the same for OMG but the difference is they are open mic. They have many first-timers coming in,” he explained.
A Preview of Tomorrow’s Show
“I'm trying out new stuff, it’s going to be one of my first sets since I’m back over the summer (…) It’s 90% new stuff. It’s exciting,” says Max van Dijk, comedian, comedy organizer and designer. He will be drawing comedic inspiration from his recent trip to Sicily with his girlfriend.
Meanwhile, eierballen provide endless inspiration for Luis Carlos Silva’s comedy. Of the eggy dish, he asks, “how do you expect flavor from something that’s been sitting under a heating lamp that’s warmer than a student house.” His part-time work and time in charge of a kitchen, coupled with his four years in the Netherlands have informed his culinary comedy.
His comedic roots are from Portugal where he initially started performing for his scout troop.
He praises the work of Bo Burnum and Luis Franco-Bastos. In tomorrow’s show he plans to showcase traditional Groninger food and a little about Portugal.
Lastly, Vlad Varvanin, a barista working on his thesis will have a queer-focused set. One of his top performing jokes is, “Not only am I bisexual but I’m also bipolar: I’m on a lot of lithium right now so about to sexually identify as a car battery-my pronouns are AC/DC.”
He sees himself as a storyteller, sharing anecdotes with the audience. Mikhail Nikolayevich Zadornov, a Russia comedian, is one of his stand-up inspirations, along with Louis C.K. Matt Rife, who he says is charismatic and excellent at crowd work.
Finding Humor in Life’s Absurdities
“I like to take an absurdist stance on everyday things and flip things on its head and maybe take the less travelled viewpoint,” says van Dijk.
One of his most popular jokes is about his father’s death during Covid-19. “I explain that he was lying in a casket and it was a hot day. I touched his hands because they were the coldest thing in the room. We were livestreaming the funeral and I was wondering why we were live streaming this, he was hardly moving.”
“I naturally gravitate towards English language stand-up, because when I write I think about the jokes in English, and I translate them in my head,” he says, explaining that he was introduced to stand-up comedy through East Coast, New York comedians like Louis C.K. and Dave Atell.
He has the following advice for new comedians, “You can cut out at least 50-60% of your original joke. The more words you cut out, the better your joke becomes and the better your set becomes: the least distance travelled to the punchline.”
Navigating Audience Sensitivity
The comedians weighed-in on how they navigate the sensitivity of today’s audiences.
Silva says he does not have enough experience yet, but “I know my sense of humor. It cannot be told to everyone, so I like to think I’m a very sensible person in that sense. I can read the room before I make a dark humor joke.”
For Pizzonia, he says he doesn’t limit himself as a performer because somebody might get offended. However, “there’s an offense that you can laugh about or there’s an offense that aims at offending, and I don’t want to do that. (…). If I were to use the N-word for whatever reason it will not be entertaining, it would be offensive and that’s not what we do.”
Van Dijk explains that “when I have people come up to me, I always say, ‘what I say on stage is not necessarily what’s in my heart.’ I put something that’s going on in the world and I put it on its head. It’s only one part in a bigger whole. If someone is offended by something they should just remember that it’s not personal. Don’t laugh and let’s move on to the next topic in the next 10 seconds.”
He added, “yelling out the N-word no joke attached, there’s no humor there, it’s just shock value. [A joke needs to be] smart on controversial subjects, to put it on top of its head and make it funny. We’re all adults, we come to a comedy show and know what it means.”
For Varvanin, when he started off there were some limits to his stand-up, but they are reducing. “There’s a way of making a joke. If you’re being abrasive and offensive you can do that. Or you can soften the blow to make them better for the audience. It’s how you say it.”
Pizzonia hopes that one day G-Spot Comedy will be a bar with a stage with live performances of music and stand-up. He wants to see a local comedian opening and someone doing an hour of stand-up.
He encourages people to come to tomorrow’s show as an alternative night of entertainment to the norm in Groningen.
Comments