In 2010, three young men — Arthur Nkusi, Michael Sengazi and Jerome Mugisha — formed Rwanda’s first comedy group, Comedy Knights. A decision they almost rued with the flop of their debut gig, which was held at the Ishyo Arts Centre in Kacyiru.

At the performance, the group’s cast of 15 comedians was even bigger than the audience, while the gate collections could only afford each of them Rwf1,000, according to Nkusi, whose journey into the world of performing arts started 10 years ago at the Mashirika Creative and Performing Arts, where he worked as a professional dancer, actor and percussionist.

Like most failed ventures, it was demoralising but Nkusi and his colleagues were not deterred; instead, they went back to the drawing board and tried to address some of the group’s most pressing issues.

Their first task was to enlist more up-and-coming comedians, ending up with the likes of Herve Kimenyi, George and John Muyenzi (better known as Babu).

With a bigger team, they began to organise comedy shows again, and this hitherto little-known entertainment took root in the social scene. But what still dogged the new breed of comedians was their little-known individual public profiles.

So, to solve this problem, they took up jobs as presenters – Nkusi went to host KFM’s Evening Drive Show, Kimenyi joined Radio10, while Sengazi joined TV10.

But even as they rode that public wave, it was not until 2012 that the Comedy Knights really got out of the shadows after big corporate companies such as MTN, Tigo and a few government agencies showed interest in their act.

READ: Comedy Knights succeed in bringing laughter to Kigali

Subsequently, their popularity shot through the roof, garnering them invites to perform in different countries in Africa and Europe.

For example, a few weeks ago, Herve Kimenyi and Michael Sengazi were invited to perform in various German cities as part of Gintersdorfer and Klassen’s award-winning production, Black Thought Now. They performed alongside standup comedians from other countries, including Ivory Coast’s Gotta Depri and Frank Yao and the German duo of Hauk Heumann and Ted Gaier.

Now four years since that disappointing evening at Ishyo Arts Centre, there is no doubt that Rwanda is in the middle of a period of standup comedy. Today, most of us are familiar with most of the established comedians, the reason their shows attract huge crowds.

Such was the case on Saturday, August 2, when Comedy Knights comedians were joined at Car Wash in Kimihurura by Kenyan comedian Eric Omondi and Kigingi, a popular Burundian comedian, for “A Night of a Thousand Laughs,” a comedy show that attracted a sizable crowd.

The comedians left everyone in stitches with their tales of day-to-day lives of East Africans.

“When Burundians get a chance to cross the border, they go back home and pretend to have forgotten Kirundi,” said Kigingi of Burundians.

Eric Omondi said of his fellow Kenyans: “... When someone wants to commit suicide by jumping from the second floor of a building, Kenyans simply encourage him or her to jump from the sixth floor...”

For the love of the art

Now Nkusi believes that comedy is growing so fast in Rwanda that a comedian can even hold a show every week, something he credits to their resilience in the game.

“We (comedians) are not businessmen but we are only trying to build the industry because of our love for the art. When we organise a show and fail to make money, we still organise another one. Those who try to do it for money fail miserably,” he says.

Still, he believes the industry has a long way to go. “We are yet to stamp comedy as a bona fide industry,” he says. “We have many problems but the major one is lack of appropriate venues. Most venues in Kigali tell us to end our shows by 8pm. Those that allow shows to go on until midnight like the Amahoro Stadium, for example, are not appropriate for comedy shows.”

The other problem is that, “Most local media houses don’t take comedy seriously. They don’t give us the coverage we deserve because they think we are just trying to eke out a living,” he says.