Alpay Erdem

Geophysics, then the back pages

Alpay Erdem was born on 20 November 1977 and graduated in geophysical engineering from Istanbul University, a qualification that has played no visible part in anything he has done since. His first amateur cartoons went to Leman, the weekly that has functioned for decades as Turkey's unofficial school for satirists, and he passed briefly through the smaller titles Soytarı and HBR Maymun before finding a home.

That home was L-Manyak, which he joined in 1997 and where he created the character that still defines his drawn work: Hasta Ruh İsmail, roughly "İsmail the Sick Soul". The strip's humour came from an unsettled interior life rather than from punchlines, and it travelled with him when he moved to Lombak.

The pattern of his twenties and thirties was a working cartoonist's: characters invented for one magazine, carried to the next. Top Canavarı, Şevki Teyze and Kamil Seven Adam appeared across Kemik and Penguen. At Penguen he also began writing prose humour under the single-word heading "Ben" — "Me" — which turned out to be the seed of everything that followed on stage.

The print record

The İsmail strips were collected as a book by Getto Basın in 2003, the first point at which Erdem's drawn work existed outside the weekly cycle. In 2008 he left Lombak and, with the cartoonist Göxel, founded a magazine of his own called Cici. It folded after two issues — a short entry in a long career, but an unusually honest one for a cartoonist to keep on the record.

He has written for Uykusuz since, and his print and broadcast work have run alongside the comedy rather than being displaced by it: he has presented 2 Teker 1 Yer, a bicycle-travel programme on NTV broadcast in a Sunday afternoon slot, which sits oddly beside the comedy-club billing and tells you something about how little he has tried to build a single marketable persona.

His most recent book is Kare Kitap, published by Epsilon Yayınevi — a collection drawn from what he treats as his mature period, with the earlier emphasis on the uncanny pulled back towards melancholy and a more controlled unease. Discussing it, he located much of the material in the flattening routine of the pandemic years.

Learning the room the hard way

Erdem started performing stand-up at the Old City Comedy Club in Istanbul in roughly 2007, taking the written "Ben" pieces to an audience. By February 2012, when Hürriyet interviewed him after a Thursday-night set there, he had done something in the order of 300 shows across five years.

The route he chose was unfashionable. Rather than consolidating in Istanbul, he went out to small districts, playing to people unlikely ever to buy a ticket in a city venue, and on occasion performed standing on a table because the room had no stage. That apprenticeship explains the shape of the act: stories he has actually witnessed, told without exaggeration and without swearing, which is why his rooms hold a far wider age spread than most Turkish comedy bills.

His account of his own method has not changed much since. "Komik olsun diye değil komik olduğu için anlatıyorum" — I tell these stories not to make them funny but because they are funny — was how he put it in 2012, adding that he had never worked a joke out in advance and that anyone not giving from the heart had no chance in the business. Ankara University's Faculty of Law named him Comedian of the Year in 2011.

Two crafts, two clocks

In an interview published on 2 December 2025, talking to Koray Sarıdoğan about Kare Kitap, Erdem drew the clearest distinction he has offered between the drawing and the performing. On paper, he said, "Kâğıttaki iş bitmiş iştir" — work on paper is finished work. It goes out complete and cannot be adjusted.

On stage the opposite applies: timing is not written but accumulated, a story reworked over weeks of performances until, in his description, it becomes musical. The same material therefore exists in two forms with two different tolerances for error, which is the practical reason his touring hours take so long to settle before he films them.

He is also oddly detached from his own creations. Of his longest-running character he said "İsmail Hasta Ruh'un ne düşündüğünü gerçekten ben de tam bilemiyorum" — I genuinely don't fully know what İsmail thinks — and that the character simply lived whatever he wanted. On the question of putting himself in the frame: "Kendimi çizseydim sıkılırdım." Drawing himself would bore him. His one article of faith about the audience is flattering to them: the humour reader, he maintains, is the smartest person in the world.

Geçenlerde, and the Bilecik apology

Erdem's newest filmed show is Geçenlerde — "The Other Day" — a 75-minute set recorded at Sahne Beşiktaş in Istanbul on Friday 25 September 2026, staged expressly for release on YouTube and built, in the venue's own billing, from material he had been working over meticulously for months.

It also produced the first sustained public trouble of his career. A passage about the city of Bilecik landed badly with people from there, and the reaction was heavy enough that Erdem removed the clip from his social media accounts and cut the section out of the special as posted. In his statement he accepted that his humour sometimes misses other people's sensitivities, said Bilecik was among his favourite and most likeable cities, and added that performing on stage there one day was one of his great ambitions.

The episode is worth noting precisely because it cuts against the act. A comic whose declared method is understatement, no exaggeration and no profanity got caught out on a place name, and his response was to edit the special rather than defend the bit.

Where he is now

Erdem is mid-run on his named touring hour, Kolsuz Tişört — "Sleeveless T-Shirt" — which is listed at 90 minutes and restricted to over-18s. The autumn 2026 dates have been concentrated in comedy-club and small-stage rooms rather than theatres: İzmir's Penguen Kültür Sanat Bistro on 24 October and again on 14 November, Ra Cafe in Aydın on 25 October, Aydın Performans Sahne on 26 October, Kılçık Mekan on the Anatolian side of Istanbul on 31 October at 20:30, and Studyou Sahne in Bursa on 15 November.

Tickets sit between roughly 550 and 835 lira depending on the room, with two-for-three offers on some nights, and the aggregate audience rating on the main seller stands at 4.4 out of 5 across a modest sample of 14 ratings. He remains a magazine humourist who tours, rather than a television comic who occasionally draws — which is unusual in Turkish comedy and is most of the reason the act sounds the way it does.