Stand-up comic Nik Rabinowitz’s popularity has rocketed these past few years. He has moved from fringy Obs Café to be able to sell out On Broadway. Part of his success is that his comedy is politically literate. In his latest show, uNik, the overall ploy from which most of the humour derives, is to transpose race, swapping the previously disadvantaged with the formerly advantaged, fantasies that reverse the status quo. So he declares, “there was one black child in the school and that was me”. He imagines more white people living in the townships, the only houses with electric fences and motorised gates; a low cost housing development introducing ten stories of concrete, graffiti, cars on blocks and the sound of gunfire to upper Constantia; the soccer league appointing “more players of no colour”; white sangomas doing corporate workshops; yo-yo championships as a black spectator sport.
Rabinowitz has started to do more female characters and he excels in them; the botoxed kugel, “the sultana of Sea Point”, Beryl Rosenberg, who has a poodle in therapy and a black grandchild, Nomhle; his “Gugs glamour girl” Portia (punning on Porsche) Van Zyl-Smith-Mvelaphanda answering the phone at the Union of Jewish Women and dispensing advice on how to be kosher.
One should not second guess a stand-up comedian’s material; they know their audience, and audiences seem to demand a certain amount of lowest common denominator. In Rabinowitz’s case it’s his braai cook, Jannie Olivier, the kaalgat kok and “master baster”. The attraction of this character, as with Alan Committie’s similar Johann van der Walt, floors me. The smutty puns and direct translations of Afrikaans into English hark back to shows that were already tired in the 1980s. Apart from this deadweight, Rabinowitz continues on the up.
