Raul Kohli: A British Hindu’s Guide to the Universe and Olga Koch: Comes From Money
First off, the BATS Theatre and Fringe Bar in Wellington are brilliant, brilliant venues for live comedy—intimate but not intrusive spaces for jokes and ideas to be shaped and built. I’ve always been partial to this kind of venue when it comes to comedy gigs, allowing the audience to really settle in and feel a part of the comic’s set. It affords a sense of risk that the comedian playing to thousands in an arena doesn’t have to worry about, where complex and controversial subjects can be discussed with a sense of mutual trust, and pockets of discomfort and silence can actually have an impact on the material and flow of the show. This is something I really like about stand-up, and as soon as I walked into Raul Kohli’s show (to the sounds of Oasis’s ‘Cigarettes & Alcohol’ blasting over the PA), I knew the environment was just right for the kind of comedy that keeps the form relevant and boundary-pushing.
Kohli’s show, A British Hindu’s Guide to the Universe, was written over the course of a run in Melbourne earlier in the year, and explores his life and career as a touring comedian, his growing connection to Hinduism and life post-lockdown. It took some time for the audience to fully settle in, with Kohli attempting a few times to engage with the crowd to little or no reply (perhaps Melbourne audiences are a little more forgiving when it comes to audience participation), but the show’s eventual shift into deeply personal introspection quietly won the room over. Kohli’s show gestures towards improvisation (at one point a Scottish person in the crowd mentioned voting against independence, and I got the sense that he would’ve gone deeper with it had the audience been more aware or more comfortable) but was clearly tightly-written and heavily workshopped; something that, given the depths the show goes to, works strongly in its favour.
I sometimes find myself a bit at odds with these kinds of shows, where the focus is on a traumatic or transformative event in the comic’s life—I’m often left feeling like I’m at a spoken word show with the occasional joke peppered in—but Kohli makes sure to break up his show up with extended, punchy routines that slot nicely into the show thematically while still delivering plenty of solid one-liners and windy setups with satisfying pay-offs (a particularly brutal scatological routine was a personal favourite).
I do think the show would’ve benefited from being a little longer, particularly given the broad scope of its premise, both on a personal and more universal level. I got the sense that Kohli was a skilled improviser, or at least enjoyed that aspect of performing, but the nature of the 50-minute time slot sort of prohibited him from fully exploring those areas. There was a sense of a rush near the end to pull everything together into a cohesive whole. Ultimately, I was thoroughly won over by the show, though, and by Raul Kohli as a performer. Thought-provoking and entertaining, but most importantly, very funny.
The audience was a lot more lively at the Fringe Bar on a Saturday, for Olga Koch’s new show, Comes From Money, also recently performed at the Melbourne Comedy Festival. Sure to match the energy of the crowd, Koch burst onto the stage, breakdancing and running around to cheers and applause before launching into her material. I found this a bit foreboding—generally, this type of energetic, confident performance style isn’t really my bag in stand-up—but I was fairly quickly won over by Koch’s witty and fast-paced opening five minutes, covering what she called one of her worst gigs ever in Pōneke last year, as well as delivering some playfully caustic topical material, including a bad-taste but very funny joke about the Pope a day after his death was announced to the public.
Comes From Money covers Koch’s privileged upbringing in post-Soviet Russia, her university education in the USA, and her current life in the class-obsessed UK. The show is dense with jokes, and her delivery and writing style are clearly indebted to the club circuit of her current home city—something I found quite interesting compared to the other, more rigidly defined shows that are often showcased at the Fringe. A mix of observational comedy, social satire and the occasional improvisational detour, Koch’s show is certainly funny (I should mention that the crowd was super into it), but I wish it had a little more to say. It’s unique to see someone from a privileged background discuss the topic of wealth inequality with honesty and compassion, but I felt like, ultimately, the show was maybe a bit too focused on treading lightly around the subject without diving into it head-on, both in terms of content and performance style.
The shift in energy when Koch addressed the loose narrative through-line to the show felt more obviously written and less playful to me, and I think a more consistently bombastic on-stage presence might’ve made the polemical material more enjoyable, and the show itself more cohesive. That said, Koch’s jokes are well-crafted, and almost every joke landed for the audience at large. Overall, I found the show to be thoroughly entertaining and funny, though I was left wanting a little more given the provocative title and subject matter.
Still, if A British Hindu’s Guide to the Universe and Comes From Money are representative of the quality of work that was on display at this year’s comedy festival, then I’m definitely looking forward to heading along to more next year—the level of craft and care on display is incredible.
I also think it’s worth mentioning the diversity of performers on the bill at the festival this year, particularly when so many of the more commercially successful comics in the world seem obsessed with mocking and belittling marginalised and under-represented groups. It’s heartening (and refreshing) to see such a broad spectrum of comedians push boundaries without resorting to cruelty, and I left both shows excited for the future of stand-up comedy, in Aotearoa and beyond.
