London’s latest headline comedian is Catalan
Sergi Polo from Barcelona has become a regular on the comedy scene in the British capital with a routine entirely in English
From his room he can hear the audience arriving at the Bill Murray Comedy Club on Raleigh Street, a residential road in the Angel neighbourhood of north London. The window is half open even though it is already dark. Sergi Polo is sitting on a sofa with his legs propped up on a table and he is looking at a laptop with an hour to go before he is due on stage to deliver his monologue. Sergi is Catalan but at just 29 years of age has become a headliner on the London comedy scene. And with an act in English.
Sergi is one of two tenants who live in the theatre. The other is James, an Irish comedian, who also has a room on the third floor. The kitchen is on the second floor, next to the dressing rooms. Every time he goes out, he has to go past the stage and this helps keep the dream that brought him to London alive.
“This is the best venue I have ever performed in because of the seating arrangement, the low ceiling, the acoustics and because the audience is very close,” he says. The club holds a hundred people and is always full. There are performances eight times a day, and Sergi has done five in one afternoon.
Distant voices can be heard from the street below. Sergi now understands English, but eight years ago when he arrived, he didn’t speak the language. “I repeated my final secondary school exams twice because I always failed English,” he says. He prepared his first monologues in Catalan and translated them using Google Translate. “I knew the monologue by heart in English, but I couldn’t speak to the promoter,” he explains.
The most surprising thing to him is that despite the language limitations the audience laughed. “I guess being from Barcelona helped; they love Barcelona here,” he says. He didn’t feel intimidated by the audience because he had been on stage since he was 10 years old, first as a magician and then as an actor, having studied acting in Barcelona. At the age of 20, after finishing his degree, he packed his bags and went to London to seek his fortune as a stand-up comedian. You could say that he learned English on stage. “Every word I use in English has been in one of my jokes before,” he confesses.
Emerging comedians
The British public broadcaster BBC has included him among the 14 most important emerging comedians in the country in English. And he won an award for best comedian in West Yorkshire, in the north of England. He is the only Catalan who is professionally dedicated to comedy in the UK.
“Here in London it’s very easy to get into it because you can perform four or five times a day and at the end of the month get a decent salary,” he says. There is a very strong comedy circuit in London with venues like the Comedy Store, Up the Creek, Top Secret or the Soho Comedy Factory, where he performs regularly. “The clubs are always full,” he says, “because here people don’t go to see a particular comedian but go to that place because they know it has interesting comedians.”
Sergi checks his emails on his laptop. The room is small with a bed, wardrobe, sofa and table. A folded bicycle leans against the wall under the window. Over the sofa is a framed painting of his grandmother Natàlia’s Barcelona apartment. As a child, Sergi went there after school to practise his magic tricks. It was a spacious apartment where he kept the cards, boxes, devices, handkerchiefs and ropes that he inherited from his grandfather, who died when he was eight. Sergi will be back in Barcelona to perform in May, and grandma Natàlia will be in the front row.
On the club’s facade are murals with the faces of famous comedians: Bill Murray, Richard Pryor, Whoopi Goldberg and Rowan Atkinson. The theatre was a bankrupt pub acquired in 2016 by Barry Ferns and other comedians to dedicate it to comedy and to give a chance to monologuers like Sergi, who was starting out at the time. As part of the Angel Comedy Club network it has become a popular comedy venue. “For me it’s a home, gym (where I practise my jokes), workplace and paradise,” says Sergi.
Ferns is the compere for the afternoon show that features five British monologuers and Sergi Polo, who is last on stage. The room is full. Sergi remembers the times he performed in half-empty venues. Once he decided to stop a show because no one was laughing. “I asked the audience, ‘Do you want to leave?’ because I do want to leave,” and suddenly they started laughing and the energy changed,” he says. He always seeks dialogue with the audience, knowing what they want: “Sometimes they want black humour; other times, you tell them jokes; other times, you interact with them.”
feature Entertainment