I generally avoid commenting on stand-up shows. It is a challenging task for many reasons. It has a lot to do with culture, with individual sense of humor. It's almost always a challenge, if not impossible, to say objectively good or bad.
This is objectively and unquestionably one of the greatest masterpieces in Turkish stand-up history. The birth of the legend of Cem Yilmaz. He analyzes Turkish culture perfectly and makes fun of it with unforgettable jokes that will be engraved in Turkish culture.
We used to listen to this stand-up in the heat of the Turkish countryside, on a 14-hour car ride with my family. Again and again. As a country, we listened until we memorized every word, without ever getting bored, without letting ourselves burst into laughter.
There is only one sad aspect of this standup. It created such a legend that years later its creator could not compete with it and was crushed under it. I guess that's the inevitable tragedy of such great artists, that eventually it turns out that they can never surpass their greatest works, and that they can't compete with those works indefinitely.
In the post-digital platform period, Cem Yilmaz can at least take solace in knowing that he is one of the biggest names that shaped the humor in Turkey in the 2000s.
