A nervous reaction to Christmas
Raybon Kan brings his irreverent look at Christmas to Downstage.
The Wellington comedian launches his solo Christmas comedy show Clear and Present Manger at Downstage on Tuesday and promises a “deconstruction” of Christmas.
“It will be like what Oliver Stone would do to Christmas if Christmas was assassinated by JFK,” Kan says. “I look at the Kiwi Christmas from an alien’s perspective. It promises to be halo-larious and wrong on so many levels.”
Manger is not for kids who still think Father Christmas may be an option.
Masterton born Kan’s irreverence of Christmas may have been nurtured by his experience as a pupil at St Mark’s Church School and Wellington College. St Marks, he says, was “gothically religious” with the ever looming threat of hell fire.
“Hell was a real option if your socks were down. There was no degree of bad. Do anything at all and it was straight to hell.”
He says Wellington College was also an anxious time with “all those rules” and teachers in black gowns wielding canes. While he says he wasn’t the funny boy at school, he did have a nervous reaction that still affects him to this day.
“When I get nervous I start giggling and at school I’d lose it in assembly. I’d always think of something funny and just crack up. It still happens to me today. The more serious the situation the more I get the giggles.”
And it’s Kan’s way of seeing the ordinary and turning the unnoticed into the bizarre, that is the trademark of his comedy.
“My comedy is hardly sophisticated. I just take the ordinary and find something funny in it.”
Although describing himself as an introvert who likes to sit quietly in the corner – “people find it rather disappointing to meet me” – Kan says he overcame his shyness when he began public speaking at high school. He then discovered debating and while studying law at Victoria University captained the Victoria team to a second place in the World Universities Debating Championships in 1985, losing the final to the University of Oxford.
After graduating with Honours in Law Kan practised for a year before turning to journalism. He began writing newspaper television reviews and a weekly column in The Listener. Before long he was also performing stand-up comedy on stage and on television. Appearances on TV3’s Nightline plus guest spots on programmes like Pulp Comedy, Laugh Festival Comedy and Skitz saw him being named Best Comedian by Metro and North and South magazines on repeated occasions. He has performed at the Melbourne and Montreal comedy festivals and at the Edinburgh Fringe, and has taken his solo comedy routine to the United States, Canada, Hong Kong and Australia.
Live comedy is his passion.
“There’s an excitement in a live comedy show, it has the sense of a tight rope, that you don’t get on TV. You’re doing the material but also discovering it and you’re free to go on tangents. You want every night to be different and you want to spark every night.”
Raybon Kan, Clear and Present Manger, Downstage Theatre, December 6-11.
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