Mac Rating: 5.00 | Votes: 1 | Date: 02/07/2026 23:44:00

Every single night of the year, the cellar under The Big Ben pub on Folkungagatan fills with laughter. Big Ben Standup is one of Stockholm's oldest stand-up clubs - it has run weekly without a break for the better part of two decades, a streak its own team claims is unique in the world - and it earned an honorary award at the Swedish Stand-Up Gala for its role as the soil in which the country's third wave of comedy grew. The formula is simple and unchanged: shows start at 20:00 and run roughly two hours with a 15-minute interval, mixing debutants testing their first five minutes with household names polishing new material between tours. Magnus Betner, Johan Glans, Henrik Schyffert, Petra Mede, Bjorn Gustafsson, Kodjo Akolor and Al Pitcher have all worked this stage, and Thursday nights traditionally run half the show in English for the international crowd. Upstairs, The Big Ben itself is a classic British-style pub with more than 50 beers and a deep whisky shelf - a natural pre-show meeting point, since pub and club share an entrance. After the comedy the night can continue in the bar, and on weekends the venue rolls straight into nightclub mode with DJs and live music into the small hours. Seating in the cellar is limited and weekend shows pack out, so arriving at the 19:00 door opening is the safe play. Medborgarplatsen metro is about 600 metres away. The club's standing in Swedish comedy is hard to overstate. When it received the honorary prize at the Svenska Stand-Up Galan, jury chairman Ozz Nujen credited the club - and founder Tomas Bonderud - with providing the ground in which Sweden's third wave of stand-up could grow, noting that without it the modern scene would look very different. The concept has kept evolving over nearly two decades of unbroken weekly operation, adding English-language evenings and improvisation comedy to the classic mixed-bill format. Tickets are sold in advance through Billetto and at the door when space allows, and the club runs every day of the year including holidays - a schedule its team believes no other stand-up club in the world has matched.