Loyiso Gola is in the throes of an anecdote in which he juxtaposes how the comedy scene in the UK, where he’s based, allows for more room for experimentation than that of South Africa.
“I was doing this show at a club called Angel, and on that night Arsenal was playing a mid-week fixture,” he says during brunch with a small group at a Rosebank restaurant.
“So I’m on stage and I start the show with, ‘Listen, you motherf******, I was hoping none of you turned up so I can cancel this sh** so I can go to the stadium. But now that we’re here I’m gonna rush it’.”
Then, 45-minutes into the show, with the crowd eating out of the palm of his hand, he announced that was wrapping things up so that he could head to the stadium.
“Some guy then goes, ‘Hey, I live near the stadium, I can give you a lift’.” Gola took him up on his offer.
During their ride to London’s Emirates Stadium, the guy said to him that he’s attended several of his shows in several cities around the UK and explained that what he’s enjoyed most is witnessing his process and experiencing the various variations of his bits.
“It dawned on me that there’s a culture of being allowed to experiment in other places that some people don’t allow you to in SA,” he explains.
“So South Africans consume comedy like an event – ‘I paid R200, therefore…’ – whereas in the UK they go, ‘Here’s some money, let’s see what’s in your head’. So they have given you the room to experiment,” he says.
Gola, one the most prolific South African comedians of the past two decades, has been predominantly based in London for eight years now.
Having relocated from Cape Town, where he was born and raised, to Joburg when he was just 19, Gola made the move when he felt that it was time to pursue a new challenge.
“Everything you kind of have to do in stand-up I’ve done it here, so I was like, okay let me go to where all the rest of the stand-ups are.
“So the plan was to be between the UK and New York, that was supposed to be 2020. But that didn’t happen because of Covid and I haven’t really resurrected that plan yet.
“I’m trying to see if I can do it next year and just be between New York and London because they’re like five hours away, it’s like driving to Durban.
“So the thinking is I just wanted to be closer to stand-up. Here (in SA) it’s like if you play one gig a night that’s it, but in London you can play six gigs a night all the time,” he says.
Gola credits this regularity on stage for helping him sharpen his craft.
When someone on our table asks him if he misses Joburg, he says, “I’ve been here so long that I just miss my friends and I miss familiarity, but I don’t really miss it in that way.
“I miss speaking my own language but I don’t really miss it, miss it. I’ve been here since I left high school, so that’s like from 2002 until now, that’s 20 years bro, that’s crazy. But I don’t miss it. Who the f*** misses potholes and sh**?”
But when he’s around, he tries to make the most of his time here. “This weekend I went all over the place. I was in Marble, I was at Royale, and then as I was leaving there I bumped into another mate and we went to a spot down the road where Capital used to be and then Barber.”
How was this whole experience “club-hopping”, I ask? “It’s all okay,” he responds, plainly. “I’m 40, none of this sh** is impressive to me.”
When it comes to his stand-up comedy, Gola shares how, lately, his approach on stage is to share interesting and unexpected tales to his audiences.
“I try to be fascinating, I try to tell them really absurd ideas. So this is the new approach I have, I have this joke that I was actually trying last night at some place in Melville about how difficult it is to kill a million people.
“So every time we see this thing in history we go, ‘Sh** that’s so horrible’. But no one goes, ‘Sh** the logistics are insane’. People are like, ‘How do you keep people chilled in a stadium full of 40 000 people?’ And I’m like ‘40 000? You try kill those people, then you’ll see chaos, then you’ll see that the logistics of this thing are crazy’.”
He adds:“Then while people are still a bit shocked about it I say, ‘Do you think the ANC, the way they are, have the organisational skills to kill a million people?’”
Gola says these sort of observations will be prominent in his upcoming Popular Culture comedy show at the Theatre on the Square at the Nelson Mandela Square in Sandton from April 17 to 29.
When I ask him to elaborate on what we can expect from the show, he shares an interesting thought that doesn’t reveal all that much about the show itself, “Culture is everything, it’s what we are in now,” he says.
“We always think of pop culture as music and the movies but we’d never think of Jesus as a popular culture.
“And Jesus is the biggest example of a popular culture because Christianity is a culture, he’s at the helm of that culture, and Christianity is one of the most popular religions in the world. So how is he not a pop star? I mean to be famous for 2 000 years, that’s crazy,” he says.
After his run with “Popular Culture”, Gola will set out on perhaps the most audacious challenge of his career.
“My next thing is I’m trying to be a globally touring act. So my goal is probably going to be to try to do 20 cities with 500 people in each city, which is a lot of people. But can I do it?”