Kale Bogdanovs is Cultured
I’ve always admired performers who can remain cheerful and give their all despite only a tiny audience showing up. I remember enjoying a young Dave Hughes perform a late night Melbourne Comedy Festival show to four of us and while acknowledging the intimacy of the group he still gave a 100% show. There is also the also the famous case of The Police playing a knock out gig to 3 people in New York who all turned out to be critical in their subsequent success in America. Kale dealt with his audience of three well the night I was there. He behaved like a charming host at a small get together, introducing us all, offering us whisky and he astutely set the microphone aside and sat down at our level, to share his insights. It is a philosophical show but Kale also tells us quite a lot about himself, sometimes unwittingly.
We quickly learn that Kale is single, lonely, related Russian royalty (no jokes he just thinks it’s something you should know) and comes from a religious background. Although he is not practicing, not unlike Sue Anne Post he has some funny, biblical referenced jokes that reminded me a little of Footloose. The bible is obviously something he knows a bit more about that a lot of comedy audiences. However, with Kale I learned how a little bit of knowledge can be a dangerous thing, women for instance. He freely admits his ignorance, yet seems blissfully unaware of his offending – in this case 2/3 of – his audience. Apart from referring to women as ‘ho’s & bitches’, without a Kitson irony, he did a ‘Cleo quiz’ that he only let the single man in the audience join in on (in his mind which was strange) – completely shutting out the women, yet claiming to try to understand women, he then did a set piece about a little thing called Droit de Seigneur. The main thing about it that irked me was that he thought he knew about it, but had failed to look it up before putting it in his act. Something that ALWAYS gets on my nerves about comedians. You might think everyone in your audience is going to be as vague about a topic as you, but it’s highly likely they are smarter than you think. If a topic interests you enough to want to write a routine about it, it takes two minutes to check it on the internet these days. But anyway, his rape routine was not done with any irony or brains and it may have got a laugh in a drunken pub of blokes (ooo imagine if you could just have sex with any girl you want?) but it was not funny in an art gallery in Fitzroy, despite the whiskey and especially from a chap who claims to be Cultured (ie refined, well educated). I also felt it was the wrong place to be slagging off the left wing political groups at uni that hassled him outside the library.
When Kale got onto his soapbox for his main topic of the evening, which came, as he admitted, free of any humour, his love of Gangsta Rap and reconciling this with his image of himself as a Cultured young man. His main claim is that Gangsta Rap is important, because it has added more words to the English Language than Shakespeare, hmmm I’d like to see that dictionary. Alright, I’m not a fan of Gangsta Rap, his passion was admirable and his theories interesting, but he needs to turn his passion into a comedy show, rather than a lecture. He moved on to lighter material where he found some great humour in his strange theories about Mary Poppins and The Princess Diaries.
I actually enjoyed most of Kale’s performance, he’s an engaging person. He chose some interesting and less pedestrian topics for his show, even if they don’t always suit my taste. I think his stories would probably go down well in a pub and with a larger crowd, but in general, he needs to think about all of his audience, and then discover what they might find funny about a single, white, Australian, middle class nerd who loves Gangsta Rap.
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