Performances / Szigligeti Company / 2025-2026

Half a Joke

from the scenes and songs of Károly Nóti

cabaret

Translated by::

It has been a tradition for several years that the Szigligeti Company welcomes the audience to the theatre on the last day of the year with a new show. For a change of genre, this New Year's Eve performance will be a cabaret, curated by Nemlaha György from the well-known scenes and songs of Nóti Károly. Some of the scene titles are: Fishing, I Had It at Lepsény, The Chandelier, The Company's Bride. It promises cloudless entertainment for all those who wish to enter the New Year in a cheerful mood. The promise is no half-joke...

Nóti Károly

Nóti Károly, a writer, journalist, and a classic of Hungarian cabaret, was born in Tasnád on February 1, 1892.

His first stage success came in 1919 with his play entitled The Lift, and he made his debut as a cabaret singer in the Apollo Cabaret in Budapest. In 1923, he settled in Budapest and became a staff member of the Magyar Hírlap. He soon gave up journalism altogether and wrote exclusively for the stage. He wrote more than 160 jokes, sketches, songs, theme variations, and lightning jokes. The atmosphere of his works reflects the world of tenement houses, cafés, boarding houses, and streets in Pest. His heroes are middle-class city residents who stumble in a comic setting, engaging in comic situations based on twisted, frivolous, and insincere comedy, amidst traditional comic misunderstandings. We are confronted with the linkages, materialism, sentimentality, deceitfulness, all the good and bad of the contemporary bourgeois of Pest.

Nóti even manages to make up for the forced situations with his linguistic bravura. He had a unique technique of juxtaposing oddly named characters (Long, Paladero, Dragon, Jegenye, Kulhanek, Shrég, Birherli), of using linguistic ingenuity to elicit questions and dialogue based on misunderstandings. His "sayings" ("I had it at Lepsény", "I'm an old motorcyclist", "Pity about the petrol") have become part of our everyday life without us knowing who they come from.

His writings are clever puns and turns of phrase, comic caricatures of the Hungarian mentality, exploiting the possibilities of the Hungarian language.

Synopsis translated by: Vivien-Tamara Sárközi