A few pages over on The Pun, Ben McKenzie has been writing a regular segment on Geek Comedy. He has described a set of criteria for this increasingly-used classification, but I will still have to defer to his judgement on how young Kale Bogdanovs, from Canberra, fits in. Bogdanovs starts off his performance familiarly enough with some self-deprecating jokes, but soon he is digging through the detail of the Bible, Dr Dre’s The Chronic and Enid Blyton books with a passionate analysis which often bubbles into anger. This is not cute Buddy Holly glasses and striped-jumper nerd chic – this is proper, pure Geek Comedy. Bogdanovs has something to say, and is devoted to his subjects.

Raised in a Christian household and bored by Canberra’s national monuments, Bogdanovs delights in subverting and inverting the artforms around him – belittling the egos of those that purport to know the difference between ‘high culture’ and ‘low’. The only problem is that he cannot know how much his audience already knows. To set up the context for his jokes requires a lot of explaining. Bogdanovs seems to sense this and rushes through the set up, making it hard to keep up with all the knots and subtext of his explorations. The result for me felt like watching someone in the middle of maddened message-board posting.

The topics fascinated, but the material won’t reach a wide enough audience. Opening-night nerves were present, as was a persistent cough, and Bogdanovs’ awareness of the audience’s ignorance on most topics meant that he tried to compensate by upping the volume of his punchlines. But this all showed his professional commitment to his comedy, and he will no doubt improve in the coming years.

Finished reading this article? You might also like:

• Kale Bogdanovs – Sympathy For The Devil
• Beyond Beats and Rhymes: A Hip-Hop Head Weighs in on Manhood in Hip-Hop Culture
• Boy Culture