Garik Oganisyan

Today, Garik Oganisyan is one of the most recognisable names on the independent Russian-language stand-up scene. A resident of Stand-Up Club #1, a familiar face from the cult YouTube show Poraz Birazza, a former writer for the popular late-night TV programme Evening Urgant, and the creator of several solo stand-up specials, Oganisyan has built a career that has taken him from small open mics to stages across Europe.

London occupies a particularly interesting place in that story. Oganisyan has performed in the British capital several times, including at the legendary Comedy Store, and has described London as a special city when it comes to his live shows.

On 17 November, he returns once again — this time with his new solo show, No Negativity.

From Grozny to Saratov

Garik Oganisyan was born on 24 July 1992 in Grozny and grew up in Saratov, the city where the first significant chapter of his comedy career began.

Comedy entered his life long before professional stand-up. Oganisyan played KVN — the hugely popular Russian-language comedy competition that became a starting point for generations of comedians — and wrote jokes for other teams.

He was associated with the Saratov State University team and later became the creative force behind a team with a suitably absurd name: “HD named after Garik Oganisyan”.

Even at this early stage, many of the qualities that would later define his comedy were already visible: a love of absurdity, wordplay, pop culture and deliberately unexpected comic constructions.

Oganisyan was also one of the founders of the popular online comedy community MHS on VKontakte.

But the real turning point was stand-up.

The First Stand-Up Show That Could Have Been His Last

One of the most revealing stories from the beginning of Oganisyan’s career took place in Saratov in 2014.

A local stand-up scene was beginning to develop around Comedy Bar Saratov, and Oganisyan was invited to perform at an open mic.

According to his own recollections, he wrote the material for his first performance only a few hours before going on stage.

The stakes were surprisingly high. Had that first attempt gone badly, Oganisyan later suggested, he might simply have decided that stand-up was not for him.

Instead, the performance went well.

What could have been a one-off experiment gradually turned into a profession.

Moscow and Comedy Battle

In January 2016, Oganisyan moved to Moscow.

Only around two weeks after arriving in the capital, he and a friend successfully auditioned for Comedy Battle, a major televised comedy competition on TNT.

They performed as a duo called Volzhskie Dali and eventually reached the semi-final of the show’s seventh season.

Television gave Oganisyan valuable exposure, but another Moscow institution would prove far more important to his development as a stand-up comedian: Stand-Up Club #1.

Five Second Places Before the Breakthrough

Breaking into Stand-Up Club #1 was not immediate.

At the time, the club was becoming one of the central venues of Moscow’s emerging independent stand-up scene. Young comedians worked their way through open mics and competitions before earning spots at the club’s larger shows.

Oganisyan repeatedly entered Money Mic, an open-mic competition offering both a cash prize and an opportunity to move further into the club’s line-up.

He finished second five times.

It is almost too perfect a story for a comedian: repeatedly getting within touching distance of winning and then coming back to try again.

Eventually, those performances paid off.

Oganisyan was invited to take part in a stand-up project for Paramount Comedy and gradually established himself at Stand-Up Club #1. Around a year after moving to Moscow, he signed a contract with the club and began performing regularly, including hosting its Big StandUp nights.

He had become a professional stand-up comedian.

Poraz Birazza and a New Audience

One of the projects most closely associated with Oganisyan is the YouTube show Poraz Birazza.

Its premise was deceptively simple: four comedians discussed the week’s news, improvised, argued, made fun of one another and ultimately tried to decide whether the previous week had been good or bad.

Oganisyan joined the show in its sixth episode, replacing comedian Artur Chaparyan. Alongside Alexey Kvashonkin, Alexander Dolgopolov and Idrak Mirzalizade, he became part of the line-up many viewers came to associate with the programme.

The audience did not immediately embrace the change.

Oganisyan has recalled that his first appearances generated plenty of negative comments, to the point where he wondered why he had agreed to join the project in the first place.

Eventually, that changed.

Poraz Birazza developed into one of Stand-Up Club #1’s best-known online projects, while Oganisyan became a regular presence in other popular comedy formats, including Razgony, Book Club, The Smartest Comedian and Stand-Up Comedians.

Writing for Evening Urgant

There is another important chapter in Oganisyan’s career that viewers familiar only with his stand-up can easily overlook.

In 2018, he joined the writing team of Evening Urgant, one of Russia’s most prominent late-night television programmes.

Oganisyan discovered that the programme was looking for writers and decided to apply. Candidates were given a test assignment with a tight deadline, testing not only their ability to write jokes but also their ability to work at television speed.

He passed the selection process, initially joined as an intern and subsequently became part of the programme’s writing team.

Writing for a daily late-night show is very different from creating a solo stand-up set. It means following the news, generating topical jokes, sketches, games and other material as part of a large team — often under considerable time pressure.

Oganisyan spent several years working on the programme.

He has also spoken about proposing a stand-up segment for Evening Urgant as part of his original test assignment.

It created an amusing professional paradox: a working stand-up comedian was helping to create stand-up for one of the country’s biggest television shows while largely preferring to remain behind the scenes himself.

Finding His Own Comic Voice

Despite television and YouTube success, stand-up remained at the centre of Oganisyan’s career.

His comedy is not limited to the conventional story-and-punchline structure. His performances combine personal observations, wordplay, self-deprecation, unexpected associations, pop-culture references and an attraction to the absurd.

At one point, he jokingly described his own style as “anti-hype post-irony”.

Pop culture has always played a particularly prominent role in his comedy. Oganisyan has developed a reputation for remembering an extraordinary amount of seemingly useless cultural information — from old television shows to Russian pop music and reality TV.

In his hands, this encyclopaedia of pop culture regularly becomes stand-up material.

Life Is the Best Playwright

In December 2020, Oganisyan released one of his major solo shows, Life Is the Best Playwright.

The title itself captures something fundamental about his approach to comedy: real life has a tendency to become stranger and more absurd than anything a comedian could deliberately invent.

Later came an almost mirror-image title: Life Is the Worst Playwright.

Another solo programme, Here and There, explored life between countries, migration, the search for home and the peculiar experience of belonging simultaneously to several places without feeling entirely settled in any of them.

Within a few years, these subjects had become anything but theoretical for Oganisyan.

A New Life in Yerevan

After February 2022, Oganisyan’s life and career changed dramatically.

He has said in interviews that after Russia’s full-scale invasion of Ukraine began, he no longer felt comfortable continuing his professional life in Moscow as before. After completing previously scheduled commitments and preparing new material, he left the country.

Yerevan became his new base.

Interestingly, despite his Armenian surname and heritage, Oganisyan had very little previous experience of living in Armenia. When he arrived in Yerevan in spring 2022, it was only his second visit to the city.

What initially looked like a temporary destination soon became an important part of his professional life.

In Yerevan, Oganisyan became one of the co-founders of Ari Stand Up Club. For the first time, he was looking at comedy not only from the perspective of a performer but also as someone involved in developing a venue and helping to build a local comedy scene.

At the same time, his touring geography expanded.

European cities and international Russian-speaking audiences became a much larger part of his career. For many of those audiences, subjects such as borders, visas, relocation and searching for a new home were no longer abstract ideas.

Inevitably, they found their way into Oganisyan’s comedy as well.

London: A Chapter of Its Own

London occupies a special place in this international chapter of Garik Oganisyan’s career.

Archived event listings reveal a growing history of appearances in the British capital.

On 27 November 2022, Oganisyan performed in London as part of a Russian-language stand-up night on Maltby Street.

On 3 July 2024, he returned for a solo show at Between the Bridges on the South Bank.

Only a few months later, on 18 November 2024, Oganisyan was back in London with his Here and There programme at The Phoenix.

Then, on 23 September 2025, came perhaps his most symbolic London appearance yet: the recording of a solo performance at The Comedy Store, one of the British capital’s best-known comedy venues.

Oganisyan later released footage from the show and described London as a particularly special city for his performances — a place where things have a habit of not going entirely according to plan and where the unexpected can become part of the show itself.

His repeated returns also point to a relationship that has developed with London’s Russian-speaking comedy audience.

London is no longer simply another stop on a European tour. It has become a recurring part of Oganisyan’s live career.

From Here and There to No Negativity

The next chapter is a new solo programme: No Negativity.

By this point, Oganisyan has already lived through several very different versions of a comedian’s career: KVN and open mics in Saratov, Stand-Up Club #1 in Moscow, the YouTube era of Poraz Birazza, writing for a major late-night television programme, relocating to Yerevan, co-founding a comedy club and touring internationally.

In that sense, his biography has begun to resemble the titles of his own shows.

First, life was the best playwright.

Then it became the worst.

After that came life Here and There.

And now, perhaps, it is time for No Negativity.

Garik Oganisyan Returns to London on 17 November

On 17 November, Garik Oganisyan returns to London with his new solo stand-up show, No Negativity.

Following his previous London appearances and his performance at The Comedy Store, the show will mark another meeting between Oganisyan and his London audience — this time with an entirely new programme.

In No Negativity, Garik brings his characteristic observational humour, self-irony and taste for the absurd to subjects including everyday life, relationships, relocation and those situations that rarely seem funny while you are actually living through them.

17 November — Garik Oganisyan live in London with his new stand-up show, No Negativity.

For those who have followed him through Poraz Birazza, Stand-Up Club #1, Razgony and his previous solo specials, it is a chance to see the new material live.

And for anyone who knows Oganisyan only through individual clips and YouTube appearances, it may be the best way to discover his comedy in the format for which it was created: in a room, in front of an audience, where nobody knows exactly what is going to happen next.