Hasan Can Kaya

Güngören to the writers' room

Hasan Can Kaya was born on 16 December 1989 in Güngören, a dense residential district in western Istanbul, into a family with roots in Malatya. He began working in film production while still at school, moving through junior crew roles before settling into screenwriting, and by the mid-2010s he was part of the writing team on the Turkish version of the sitcom 1 Erkek 1 Kadın.

The move to performing came from inside that room. In 2014 colleagues on the show pushed him to take his own material to an audience, and from 2016 he was performing stand-up regularly at Leman Kültür in Beşiktaş. It is an unusual route into comedy: he arrived at the microphone as a working joke-writer rather than as a club open-miker, and the habit of constructing a night out of found material rather than his own has shaped everything he has done since.

The show that interviews the audience

In January 2020 Kaya started shooting his own project, Konuşanlar Talk Show, and put it out on YouTube. The format depends almost entirely on strangers: he picks people out of the seats, asks them about themselves, and lets the exchange run until something genuinely odd surfaces. He is the straight man in his own programme, and the laughs belong to whoever is standing next to him. It found a mass audience fast, reaching roughly 1.75 million subscribers with episodes averaging in the region of 19 million views.

In December 2020 the show moved behind the subscription platform Exxen and the YouTube back catalogue was taken down. It stayed there for years, passing 150 episodes and becoming one of the platform's most-watched productions, while a short-form clip channel carried the reach a paywall could not: around 3.4 million subscribers and some 1.7 billion views in total. In 2025 the programme changed homes again, to Disney+, where the first episode under the new arrangement went out on 19 September 2025.

Kaya has been explicit that the format lives or dies on who turns up. Speaking to Hürriyet in May 2022, he said the programme works best with people who tell their stories sincerely and want nothing from the evening beyond enjoying it, and that those who arrive chasing exposure tend to come off worst, because their stories feel forced. The method is comedy of elicitation, and it leaves him dependent on a room he cannot rehearse.

Oxford, the backlash and the prizes

In 2022 he was invited to speak at the Oxford Union on universal humour, the first comedian from Turkey to do so, and the relationship outlasted the lecture: episodes of Konuşanlar were later filmed at Oxford. The trip also produced the sharpest piece of criticism of his career. A comment circulated claiming his audience was uneducated, and in the Hürriyet interview of May 2022 he described sitting down to work out what would make someone write that, calling it his breaking point. His following, he pointed out, runs from Sorbonne academics to security guards, and he framed the hostility as the price of making comedy for very large numbers of people in Turkey and succeeding at it.

The awards came in parallel with the audience. Konuşanlar took Best Internet Format at the 2020 Life & Beauty Awards and Best Talk Show at the 10th Social Media Awards the same year, then Best Digital Content at the 47th Altın Kelebek Awards in 2021; Kaya became the first comedian to take an Altın Kelebek three years running. İstanbul Kültür University gave him a career award in 2022. Alongside the talk show he has appeared in the sketch institution Çok Güzel Hareketler Bunlar, the 2021 series Bir Yeraltı Sit-com'u, and the feature Çok Aşk.

Where he stands in October 2026

The current position is a broadcaster at full strength and a touring act at rest. After a long gap, a new season of Konuşanlar began on Disney+ on 2 October 2026, announced with a poster and trailer and trailed heavily in the Turkish press, with the format unchanged: audience members telling their own stories while Kaya works off whatever they say. Turkish outlets treated the return date as news in its own right, which is a fair measure of where the show sits in the market.

The international stand-up operation has gone quiet by comparison. His European run was billed as Stand-Up Party and moved through Stuttgart, Berlin, Mannheim, Bochum and Munich in December 2023, five shows that sold out weeks in advance and sent some fans to other cities to find a seat, with follow-up dates then trailed for Germany, Austria, Belgium, the Netherlands, England and Switzerland. Songkick's calendar now lists him as off tour, its most recent entries being Hamburg and Duisburg in November 2024, and European listings for the stand-up show are sold as 18+.

Away from the stage, he married Duygu Karabaş in the United States in June 2026 and appeared publicly with her for the first time at a Konuşanlar event in Istanbul on 8 October 2026, telling reporters that marriage suited him and had made him more disciplined. On the ticketing side, the only dates on sale are two Istanbul tapings, on 27 and 28 October 2026 at Grand Pera Alternatif Sahne, and both are sold out.

Four hours at Grand Pera

The live product is unusually long and unusually structured. Every show happens at Grand Pera Alternatif Sahne in Taksim, and the programme's own guidance puts the running time at three and a half to four hours including an interval. There is no billed support act and no warm-up name; the opening stretch is Kaya working the room, and the speakers who will carry the rest of the night are chosen at random from the audience during those first conversations. Requests to go on stage are not accepted and nobody is cast in advance — the official line is that everyone who buys a ticket is a potential speaker.

The practical rules follow from the fact that it is also a shoot. Tickets are sold only through Biletix, with no door sales, no reservations and no group arrangements, and seating is assigned by staff on entry rather than chosen. The evening is filmed and edited before broadcast, and anyone who wants something they said handled differently has to raise it before transmission, because nothing can be changed afterwards. Audience opinion splits along predictable lines: the draw is that nobody in the building knows what is coming, while some long-standing viewers argue the conversations have thinned over the years and that the format has settled into a routine.