Nik Rabinowitz came out of college with a business degree and an afro. “And those two things didn’t really go too well together,” he says. That’s when Rabinowitz decided to get into stand-up comedy.
The 38-year-old Rabinowitz is in London now, where he’s taking part in this weekend's Cape Town Funny Festival with other South African comics. Unsurprisingly, convicted athlete Oscar Pistorius is sure to play a prominent role in the stand-up routines at this year’s festival, says Rabinowitz.
“Not all of us keep our guns under the pillow,” he jokes.
But in all seriousness, Rabinowitz says Pistorius's conviction was probably less significant to many South Africans than the they way the star Olympian conducted himself during the televised trial. Pistorius appeared to be blaming the nation’s culture of lawlessness, he suggests.
“His reluctance to be responsible for his actions, I think that was a major thing,” Rabinowitz says. “There’s a lot of crime in South Africa. We all deal with it. It doesn’t mean we have the right to go and shoot people in a bathroom because we think there’s an imaginary somebody there."
Beyond the Pistorius trial, Rabinowitz says South African politics provide great riches in terms of material for the country’s comics. “[President] Jacob Zuma is a very firm favorite among comedians,” he says. “[Zuma] currently has six wives and he’s just built himself a mansion. He spent about $20 million of the taxpayers’ money creating this house.”
Rabinowitz does a comedy radio show focused on politics. He describes himself as South Africa’s funniest, Xhosa-speaking, Jewish comedian. He learned the tonal African language, distinctive for its clicking consonant sounds, growing up on a farm outside of Cape Town.
“I grew up with Xhosa speakers,” he says. “I like to think of myself as the white sheep of their family.”
Rabinowitz says his first comedic influence was one of his father’s good friends, an actor and comedian who told stories in the Afrikaans language. Rabinowitz says Eastern European Jews of his grandfather’s generation who settled in South Africa were native Yiddish speakers. But they learned Afrikaans, which is similar to Yiddish, to do business with local farmers. And that is where Rabinowitz says his sense of humor comes from.
“Many of my stories are in Afrikaans, which is wonderful in South Africa. But when I come to America,” he says in jest, “people are very confused and don’t know what I’m talking about.”
Before the end of the apartheid era, Rabinowitz says South Africa didn’t have much of a tradition of stand-up comedy, nor were there many comedy clubs or a circuit for up-and-coming comics to perform. But since then, “comedy has been quite a big part of nation building and dealing with the past in South Africa.”
“Race-based comedy has been very much prevalent,” he says. “[But] we’re moving away from that a little bit.”
“Comedy has played a role in bringing people together and being able to laugh about what happened, which was pretty tragic and brutal,” he says.