Meet Olga Koch, the British-Russian stand-up comedian, who is touring Mumbai

Meet Olga Koch, the British-Russian stand-up comedian, who is touring Mumbai

Apr 15, 2023 - 11:30
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Meet Olga Koch, the British-Russian stand-up comedian, who is touring Mumbai

Being an outsider can make you long for something, someone or somewhere to belong to but it can also unshackle you from the predictability that accompanies a sense of home. It can make you see your surroundings in ways that entertain; first yourself, and then others.

Stand-up comedian Olga Koch – who was born in Russia, and currently lives in the United Kingdom – loves to own her identity as an outsider and milk it for jokes that have people laughing till they cry, whether the topic of conversation is patriotism, sex, immigration, politicians like Priti Patel and Vladimir Putin or movies such as American Pie and Titanic.

Soho Theatre from London is bringing Koch to Mumbai for performances at The Habitat in Khar on April 15 and 16, and G5A Foundation for Contemporary Culture at Mahalaxmi on April 20. Indian stand-up comics Urooj Ashfaq, Sapan Verma and Aditi Mittal will be guest performers at these shows. We bring you an interview with Koch prior to these shows.

Olga Koch

You switched to stand-up comedy after studying computer programming. That sounds like a typical Indian scenario where people start out with a career path that pleases their parents, and at some point, decide to prioritize creative fulfilment. Was your family supportive when you first told them that you’d like to be a stand-up comedian?

My parents grew up in the Soviet Union, so they definitely raised me with quite a prescriptive idea of what a “real job” is. If I am being honest, I still don’t know if being a comedian is a real job. Surely, telling strangers my deepest secrets in dark rooms can’t be a real job? In terms of my parents’ support, well, they still don’t know that I am a full-time stand-up comic. They think of it as a hobby that I am pursuing on the side while I apply for PhD programmes. This excuse has served me well for the last 18 months but it is starting to wear thin.

How have your experiences across countries and cultures shaped your sense of humour? You were born in St. Petersburg, completed your higher education in New York City and are currently living in London. How do you feel when show producers, audiences or critics characterize your humour as Russian or American or British?

Living in different countries has allowed me to set myself up as an outsider within any culture I live in. This is convenient for writing comedy because it means that I always have a clear perspective for my jokes. Though I have done the vast majority of my performing in the United Kingdom and my humour can most closely be classified as British, my American accent and Russian name always position me to audiences as a foreigner looking in.

Tell us about your work with Soho Theatre, and how this Mumbai tour came together.

Soho Theatre in London had been a venue that I attended religiously as a comedy fan. In 2015, I found out they offered stand-up comedy classes and immediately signed up. That first day in the basement of my favourite theatre, my life changed forever! I met my best friends and I learned how to properly hold a microphone – which are equally important events in my life). After that class, I took every other class Soho Theatre had to offer, from sketch comedy to cabaret. At the very beginning of my comedy career, Soho Theatre created a really safe and nurturing place to try new things, experiment, and – most importantly – fail.

Once I took every class available twice over, I felt confident enough to gig more and eventually do my first hour. Performing that first hour and my consequent shows at the theatre has always felt like a homecoming. Then they invited me to record my show, Homecoming, for Amazon Prime! And now they have been kind enough to bring me to Mumbai and give me a chance to work with Soho Theatre India and perform at fantastic venues like Habitat and G5A. I feel fortunate to work with every person on the Soho Theatre team and thank my lucky stars every day for that first class in Soho Theatre’s basement.

Olga Koch

What kind of research goes into writing new material or adapting older material before you perform in a country you haven’t visited before or spent much time in? Do you worry about whether certain jokes might land as well as they do with British audiences, and about whether you might get into trouble for saying something seen as offensive?

In general, I worry all the time for all of the reasons you mentioned, and just about everything else under the sun. To get more specific, I did my first open spot in Mumbai on April 13 and had a green room full of the most talented comics in India help me workshop what the local equivalent of the band One Direction was for a punchline. We settled on Anuv Jain.

You roasted the Life in the UK citizenship test in your Amazon Prime show Homecoming and your radio show OK Computer. This test is known for institutionalizing xenophobia and racism. Does your critique of it resonate differently with white and BIPOC (Black, Indigenous, People of Colour) audiences?

 I sincerely hope that my material about the Life in the UK test reads very clearly as disparaging and never comes across as an endorsement. I have found that more conservative audiences get slightly more defensive about my questioning of it, but I suspect that their response has more to do with their general attitudes towards immigration.

When you turn your life experiences into material for comedy, how do you maintain a certain degree of emotional distance so that you don’t get retraumatized while retelling?

This is something that I think about every day of my life, and I am afraid I still don’t have an answer for you. In general, I have found that re-telling traumatic experiences night after night does eventually desensitize you to their emotional impact, but I’m not sure how healthy that is. Arguably, an even scarier effect of doing very personal comedy is that now I find that a part of me makes life decisions based on how they would play out as comic material. I got a tattoo of a prawn the other day and I don’t know how much of me did that for comic content.

Chintan Girish Modi is a writer, journalist and educator who tweets @chintanwriting

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