Stand-up comedian John Vlismas is heading for the international stage. ALEXANDER SUDHEIM laughs along
HE skids on to stage, a lunatic druid on bad speed. Collides with the microphone. Glares at the audience with gargoyle eyes; shaven head; undertaker’s suit. Weird beard; hideous raptor leer. Explodes into bursts of language like a runaway catherine wheel (defined in the Oxford dictionary as “rotating firework, lateral handspring with arms and legs extended”). Ladies and gentlemen, lock up your daughters with the sacred cows and please welcome – live and uncut – John Vlismas!
Undoubtedly one of the finest comedians working in the country today, Vlismas does a whole lot more than stand up and tell jokes. His routine – raw, intense, offensive and sidesplittingly funny – recently garnered the 25-year-old an invitation, together with fellow comic shock-trooper Gilda Blacher, to the prestigious Just For Laughs in Montreal later this month. The world’s largest comedy festival is also the international hub of agents, talent scouts and TV stations hungry for new talent.
Maniacal as the stage show is, Vlismas’ energy is clear and focused as a zoom lens, spying out the grisly unmentionable things squirming in the cracks and shadows of everyday order. From religion and politics to feminism and fat people, Vlismas pokes at every uncomfortable taboo with a sharp stick, displaying a novelist’s eye for the sort of crucial visual detail which suddenly delights audiences with a shock of recognition.
It is this gift of converting the spoken word into acutely detailed images that marks Vlismas as a virtuoso soloist; his careening narratives possess the sheer will to conjure up interior cinema in your brain. From anus- piercing (“OK, who’s the ringleader here?”) to the vulnerable male ego (“Just start the foreplay without me, I’ll be right back”); from Sandton shopping to Pagad activism (“Those Muslims are full of Shi’ite”) he shrinks from nothing to jolt audiences out of anaesthetised reality.
This assault on “sensitive issues” puts Vlismas in the tradition of unhinged comic genius Lenny Bruce, of whom The Washington Post said: “He believed in free speech with passion often masked by the jokes he told. He was a social satirist; one of the boldest and one of the best.”
With the years to come, Vlismas’s vision can only mature and deepen, for his mission to kick the backside of hypocritical social consecrations with stinging wit and merciless humour is a daunting one indeed.