- Year of foundation – 2012
- City – Kyiv (Ukraine)
- Genre – humor (sketch show, stand-up, humorous concerts, comedy series, parody)
Team composition:
- Hryhoriy Shevchenko – studio producer;
- Yevgeny Yanovich – studio author and actor;
- Ivan Melashenko – creative producer, author and studio actor;
- Dmytro Andrienko – studio author and actor;
- Iryna Khomenko – studio actress and voice;
- Hanna Gres – studio actress;
- Oleg Maslyuk – studio actor;
- Yuriy Gromovoy – actor studio;
- Ihor Reva – author and actor of the studio;
- Volodymyr Kravchuk – actor of the studio;
- Olexiy Reva – author and actor of the studio;
- Alisa Tunkevych – actress of the studio.
History of creation
“Mamahohotala” (since December 2023 after rebranding – “Mamahohotala”) is a Ukrainian humor studio, founded in Kyiv in 2012. The most famous project of the studio is the “Mamahohotala” Show. The studio is a vivid example of how student humor can grow into an influential cultural phenomenon and a full-fledged player in the Ukrainian entertainment industry. The history of the collective began with KVK, where future artists, authors and producers were not yet divided into roles, but worked as a single creative group - everyone wrote texts, everyone went on stage and together searched for their own style. It was from this freedom that charisma was born, which later provided the studio with recognition, popularity and a loyal audience.
The producer of "Mamahohotala" Hryhoriy Shevchenko and the director and co-founder Roman Hryshchuk have repeatedly emphasized that the decisive stage was regular stand-up concerts, which started around 2013. The performances took place at the Maly Opera on Lukyanivka and quickly gathered fans of live humor around them. It was there that the collective was noticed by representatives of the NLO TV channel and offered to transfer this energy to the television format. This is how the debut of the show “Mamahohotala” took place, which later significantly changed its content – nothing remained of the first concert formats, and stand-up completely disappeared from the air, giving way to sketches and serial humor.
The brand name “Mamahohotala” appeared during one of the brainstorming sessions and immediately set the tone for all the work – adult, observant, sometimes provocative humor, designed for a conscious audience. The audience heard this name for the first time at a big concert at KPI, where it became clear: before them was not just a group of jokers, but the future leader of the comedy scene.
Over time, a clearer division of roles was formed in the studio – by the fifth season, a separate acting team appeared, and the team of scriptwriters expanded. Although those artists who combined author's work with performances remained. Roman Hryshchuk himself later figuratively called himself the cement that holds all creative people together within the same team.
The Creative Path
In 2012, the team was actively looking for a TV channel for cooperation. Among the options was the Ukraina channel. However, it quickly became clear: in order to work with such a target audience, the authors would have to radically change the topics of jokes and the style of presentation. So the choice fell on the youth UFO TV. The first episode of "Mamahohotala Show" was released on December 1, 2013 - literally the day after the violent dispersal of students on Euromaidan, when the country was not ready for entertainment. However, since spring, the project has entered a stable rhythm and gained popularity and recognition. The team began to release two seasons a year - spring and autumn, gradually returning humor to the daily lives of viewers.
Since 2015, the studio has been going to concerts and tours in Ukraine. The first attempts were financially difficult – the two initial tours ended in losses, as all the money earned in a year went to organizing the performances. At the same time, these concerts had another value: they became a live contact with fans, a way to expand the audience, strengthen the brand and feel the reaction of the audience live.
Style and Creative Development
The studio's creative output covers several areas and formats at once - from sketch shows and stand-up to humorous concerts and comedy series, which combine parodies, live improvisation and apt observations of everyday life and modern culture. In the fall of 2015, the studio presented the sketch show "Maslyuky", where ten bright characters with the same last name appeared. All roles - both male and female - were performed by the studio's artist Oleg Maslyuk, which became a real acting experiment and brought the project wide recognition. Since 2017, all production has been released exclusively in Ukrainian, which has become an important part of the brand's identity.
In early 2018, Mamakhokhotala, in collaboration with NLO TV, launched the series Curators, a youth comedy about foreign students of a medical university in Ukraine. The main roles were played by Yevhen Yanovych and Oleg Maslyuk, and the project itself established the studio as a team capable of working with a series format and expanding its own genre palette. On New Year's Eve from December 31, 2018 to January 1, 2019, the premiere of the animated sitcom for adults "Danger Zone" took place, and during 2019 the full first season was released, which confirmed the studio's willingness to experiment with forms and styles.
After a forced pause, on December 31, 2023, the first major concert under the updated Mamakhokhotala brand was released on the studio's YouTube channel. This return was an important signal for fans and showed that the team has retained its energy, relevance and desire to develop Ukrainian humor culture in new conditions - just as music or hits of individual performers form their audience, the studio's humor continues to find a response from thousands of viewers.
Awards and distinctions:
In 2015, the Mamahohotala Show was nominated for the national Teletriumph award.
Social activity
In 2021, the Mamahohotala studio launched a large-scale social project "The Land of Sunny Bunnies", which included 12 short films and the same number of conversations with experts. The idea was to honestly and accessiblely highlight twelve socially important topics that rarely come into the spotlight. The project addresses issues of sexual education of children, cyberbullying, domestic violence, the spread of fakes, tolerance, animal protection, problems of people of respectable age, donation, environmental challenges, charity, etc.
Stars of Ukrainian art and show business took part in the project, in particular - Oleksandr Rudynskyi, Alina Pash, Akhtem Seitablayev, Igor Kondratyuk, Svitlana Tarabarova, Olga Sumska, Anna Dobrydneva, Olga Tsybulska and others.
YouTube projects:
- “Dangerous transmission”;
- “ZNO” with “Mamahohotala”;
- “4POKER”;
- “BEZOOMNI”;
- “Maslyuk reads”;
- “Kasyrka Lyuba”.
Interesting facts about the team:
- the studio participants call themselves a funny family;
- most consider the “Mamahohotala” Show to be their most successful project;
- the funniest among the studio artists, according to most participants, is Oleg Maslyuk.
