Arts & Theatre · Comedy
İsmail Nuri
8 dates on sale
On tour
Every date the ticketer lists, worldwide · venue time
TicketsArts & Theatre · TRİsmail Nuri - Stand Up (Yeni Gösteri)Corner Kadıköy · İstanbulTicketsArts & Theatre · TRİsmail Nuri - Stand Up (Yeni Gösteri)Landon Coffee Aydın · AydınTicketsArts & Theatre · TRİsmail Nuri - Stand Up (Yeni Gösteri)Sardunya Alsancak · İzmirTicketsArts & Theatre · TRİsmail Nuri - Stand Up (Yeni Gösteri)Corner Kadıköy · İstanbulTicketsArts & Theatre · TRİsmail Nuri - Stand Up (Yeni Gösteri)Corner Kadıköy · İstanbulTicketsArts & Theatre · TRİsmail Nuri Stand Up - Yeni GösteriPENGUEN Kültür Sanat Bistro & Comedy Club · İzmirTicketsArts & Theatre · TRİsmail Nuri - Stand Up (Yeni Gösteri)Studyou Cafe - Bursa · BursaTicketsThe profile · researched 19 September 2026
The improviser who learned to write it down: İsmail Nuri's slow crossing into stand-up
İsmail Nuri spent two decades as one of the people who built improvised theatre in Turkey, then a 2025 YouTube special put his name on ticket pages in four cities. His autumn 2026 run of the new hour reaches Istanbul, İzmir, Bursa and Ankara.
A stage with no script and no director
Improvised theatre arrived in Turkey late. A human-resources trade magazine interview published in April 2008 dates the form's local starting point to 2001, some six decades after it took shape in the United States, and describes the group behind the piece as led by Nuri — its captain and, in the writer's phrase, its brain. The pitch is set out in a single line: a play with no scenario and no director, where the audience names the situation and the cast plays it. The same interview gives the rule the whole method rests on, that the golden rule of improvisation is listening. At that point the company had roughly a year of corporate performance work behind it, playing to institutions and firms rather than to ticket-buyers.
A profile published by the Çanakkale paper Boğaz Gazetesi in July 2023, ahead of a show at Karadut Bistro Cafe on the island of Gökçeada on 19 July, filled in what the intervening years had produced: around fifteen years of professional work spanning improvised theatre, dance and personal-development training, thousands of one-to-one and group sessions, and close to two thousand improvised performances in Turkey. The same piece records workshops taught at international festivals in Barcelona, Copenhagen and Athens, a period studying the Greek sirtaki and zeibekiko alongside professional dance ensembles, and spells of producing and presenting television and radio.
YOTA, and a stage of his own
The vehicle for most of this is YOTA Doğaçlama, which ticket listings credit him with founding. The group's public pages name İsmail Nuri, Pınar Fidan, Mutlunur Lafçı and Sinan Mutlu among the performers who have worked together over many years, and describe more than a decade of work with large Turkish companies and institutions — training days, motivational meetings, product launches — running in parallel with the public shows.
The company also runs a room. Yota Sahne, in Beyoğlu, has operated as both an improvisation venue and a comedy stage; listings under the name Yota Komedi Sahnesi go back to the 2016 season, a ticketed improvised-theatre night was sold there for 22 October 2023, and the group's own posts describe a standing Friday-night Beyoğlu stand-up bill. Having a stage rather than renting one matters to how the later touring works: the new hour opens at home before it goes anywhere else.
Doğaçlama Adam
The stage work that carries most weight is Doğaçlama Adam, a solo improvised show still listed as in performance on tiyatrolar.com.tr alongside his stand-up. It runs in two acts, each built from a different set of long-form improvisation games, with the starting points supplied by the room and every character on stage played by Nuri alone. Ticket copy bills it as the first show of its kind staged in Turkey.
Listings place his work across venues on Istanbul's European side, among them Grand Pera Emek Sahnesi, Asmalı Sahne and Cihangir Atölye Sahnesi. The solo-improv discipline explains a good deal about what the stand-up looks like now — the habit of taking material from the audience and running with it did not get left behind when he moved to written jokes.
The special that changed the booking sheet
Hayatın Yüzde Doksan Beşi — Life's Ninety-Five Per Cent — went up on YouTube in 2025, with clips pushed out through Kotiki Studios from June that year. It has become the single line of biography that every promoter uses: Biletix, Biletinial, Radar Türkiye and the regional listing sites all open their copy with the same sentence, that the performer who drew wide praise for the show he published on YouTube is bringing a new one to town. For an act who had spent twenty years working largely in a room-by-room, word-of-mouth format, a recorded hour did the job that a television break does for others.
Shorter material circulates alongside it. The TuzBiber stand-up channel carries his 'Buharlı Tuvalet' set, and further clips — 'Bit Hikayesi', 'Fakir Mutluluğu', and a run of shorts including one on the Istanbul metro — keep the name moving between tour legs. His Instagram account, @ismailnuri_, carries around 143,000 followers.
Where things stand, autumn 2026
The current touring product is billed plainly as Stand Up (Yeni Gösteri) — the new show — and the autumn 2026 leg is a compact four-city run rather than an extended tour. It opens on his own stage, at Yota Sahne in Beyoğlu on 19 and 20 September at 20:30, then crosses to the Anatolian side for Corner Kadıköy on 22 and 24 September at 20:00. İzmir takes two nights in different rooms: Penguen Kültür Sanat Bistro & Comedy Club on 25 September and Sardunya Alsancak on 26 September. Bursa's Studyou Cafe follows on 27 September, with a return booking there on 24 October, and Ankara's Route Sahnesi on 10 October at 19:00.
Tickets start at ₺594, rising to ₺667 for the Beyoğlu nights, and every date carries an 18+ restriction — under-eighteens are refused entry rather than admitted with an adult. Earlier 2026 dates already played include Ada Roof on 10 May and a Corner Kadıköy night on 23 July, and the Ankara relationship predates this run: he played Route Sahnesi on 27 October 2024. The pattern across all of it is small and mid-sized rooms — comedy clubs, bistro stages, café venues — rather than theatres, and the same handful of cities revisited every few months.
What the room says
The longest-running public record of audience reaction is the Ekşi Sözlük entry under his name, and it is unusually consistent. Entries from April 2018 describe a show that ran an hour and a half and worked its way through childhood material, praise the improvisation and what one writer called an original comic approach, and note a full house; one contributor from that week thought the running time could be trimmed, and another read him as tense on stage. By 2023 and 2024 the tone had settled into steady enthusiasm — the most-laughed-at comedian of recent times, according to one November 2023 entry, and 'çok underrated' in another from November 2024. A January 2025 entry is a straight endorsement; one from March 2025 is not.
The record is not uncritical. In July 2023 a contributor accused him outright of reproducing a bit from the Seinfeld pilot; the charge sits there unanswered. An entry from August 2024 asks why the 11 August show had been cancelled. Neither has dented the booking pattern, which has broadened rather than narrowed since the special landed.
The show, now
The touring show is listed at 90 minutes and restricted to over-eighteens, with under-age entry refused at the door rather than discretionary. It is sold as solo stand-up, though promoter copy for the Istanbul dates notes that other comedians are brought onto the bill on the Beyoğlu and Kadıköy nights, so a ticket in those rooms can mean a short support set before the headline hour. Audience participation is part of the method rather than a flourish — listings describe him drawing individual spectators into the show, which is consistent with a performer whose main stage work, Doğaçlama Adam, is built entirely from starting points shouted up from the room. Staging is minimal by venue: Corner Kadıköy, Penguen in İzmir, Studyou in Bursa and Route in Ankara are club and café stages rather than theatres, so this is a microphone, a stool and a low platform, with 20:00 or 20:30 starts everywhere except Ankara, which goes up at 19:00. Ekşi Sözlük entries from audiences describe a show that flows over roughly an hour and a half and works heavily from childhood and everyday material — an April 2018 writer thought it could be tightened, while entries through 2023 and 2024 consistently call him underrated and very funny, with a dissenting note in March 2025 and a 2023 complaint that one bit closely resembled a routine from the Seinfeld pilot.
Researched from biletinial.com · biletix.com · bogazgazetesi.com.tr · hrdergi.com · biletinial.com · biletinial.com · tiyatrolar.com.tr · eksisozluk.com