A BRAIN WALKS OUT OF A BAR …
No really, it can happen
● People pay to be entertained by professional comedians not only because professional comedians are funnier than the rest of us. It’s also because they are cleverer.
Seeing the ridiculous side of things — sometimes including things that are awful and tragic — takes a brain with the ability to probe beyond acceptable perceptions. Good comedy often makes us uncomfortable, and laughter is a natural reaction to being pushed beyond the boundaries imposed by our protective brains.
John Vlismas has been thinking a lot about the brain of late. And when Vlismas thinks about something, he embarks on an in-depth study of it. This is why, as we sit in a Johannesburg hotel lounge on a winter’s afternoon, he is talking about neuroplasticity and other brainy concepts.
“The brain is a very unlikely organ,” he says.
“It’s three pounds of tofu with no pain receptors that no one really understands. And then when you do finally understand it, it’s basically time to die. It’s the universe’s biggest joke.”
His research has led to his new one-man show, Brain Dump ,a very different vehicle to his last solo stage vehicle, The Good Racist, which ran to packed theatres in Johannesburg and Cape Town for weeks and weeks.
“I did that show a lot,” he says.
“I loved the research and the reactions — obviously there was some knee-jerk anger from white people, but overwhelmingly the comments on social media were ‘I laughed and I thought’, which was very cool, exactly what you want. But next I wanted to do something less pointed, something really light and interesting.”
Following his own interest in the mind and the brain, he began reading multiple texts on subjects beginning with “neuro”. Then, a few weeks ago, his father, Spiro, had a stroke.
“Next thing I’m talking to doctors about neural pathways and occlusions . . . all this stuff was suddenly very relevant. I said to Dad the other day ‘You’re very considerate to have done this at this particular point in time’, and he gave me a little laugh.”
Vlismas is now dividing his time between work in Joburg and his parents in Durban. He has just come from Henley Business School, where he obtained permission to delay the next segment of his MBA due to his family commitments. From here he is going to a meeting with fellow comedian Alfred Adriaan to discuss their next tour of Australia. His brain does not know the meaning of idleness.
It’s not about what’s polite. Comedy must be horror’s neighbour
Fan of disruption
In 1996, Vlismas moved to Joburg once he’d begun to make comedic inroads in his hometown of Durban, where his parents ran a restaurant. His first Highveld gig was at the Punchline Pub, a venue opened by then Civic Theatre director Maralin Vanrenen to give aspiring comics a place to be heard.
Apart from more tattoos and slightly more forehead, the 45-yearold sitting here today in a neat red sweater is not all that different in appearance from the manic young comedian in signature all-black who leapt onto the podium during that first appearance in the bar of what is now the Joburg Theatre (where he hung his jacket on the mic stand and called it Karen Carpenter). He is just as intense and iconoclastic, but there is a quietness about him and a sense of focus. His daughter, who has just turned 17, is central to his busy life. “She’s a good human,” he says.
“She’s our head of digital, constantly telling me how I mess up on Instagram and asking why I bother with Twitter.”
For her birthday they went on a father-daughter trip.
“I took her to Paris to meet Mr Picasso and Mr Rodin and a few other people,” says Vlismas, who is also a painter.
Vlismas used to be prone to all the excesses common to those in the entertainment industry, but wanting to be a better father prompted his move to a sober lifestyle. He has not touched a drink or any other addictive substance for 13 years. He and Taffia Keight, who is also his business partner, have been together for 14 years.
“Working together is not without its challenges,” he says “but increasingly I learn more about how brave that lady is.”
Together they run Whacked Management, which was started to manage Vlismas’s own bookings but has grown into a multipronged company that manages other talent and books any speaker or entertainer for any event.
Vlismas is also a partner in two production companies, one in Durban and one in Johannesburg, and has created a separate vehicle to run the Savanna Comics’ Choice Awards, which has spread to encompass other countries in Africa.
“We now have voting in 13 countries for the Pan-African comic of the year award,” says Vlismas. “The shortlist is created outside but the final voting is in South Africa, so it’s still true to the idea of the South African Comics’ Choice. We hope to be able to expand and offer more awards throughout Africa. Ultimately there should be some kind of body in each country.”
Technology has been invaluable in forging these connections, he says. “Just using WhatsApp we’ve been able to build quite a big community of African comedians who can help and guide each other with invoice templates or contracts and so on.
“We introduced a vernacular award two years ago after we had a guy come and protest at one of the meetings where we consult with the industry. He was very upset that it was an English-language thing only, so we said: ‘OK, instead of arguing with you, why don’t you join us and let’s figure out a way to do this, because how do I as an English-speaking comic vote for the funniest vernacular?’
“So we have a new rule which says that you can vote in this category if you perform 80% of your work in a vernacular language, because you have to have an appreciation of it.
“Around Africa at the moment the award is for mainly comedy in English, but we’re working on a version of Google Translate — it’s a very primitive solution for now, but like WhatsApp it’s a simple solution to get us going and then we’ll refine.” Vlismas is interested in “destroying boundaries in the continental entertainment structures in Africa”, which he plans to make the subject of a thesis.
His decision to embark on an MBA came after he was hired to organise Henley Business School’s “Like Mind” events. These are free think tanks held every month at a Johannesburg hotel, where four top speakers do 10 minutes each, followed by a panel discussion with 50 invited audience members.
He has since become a facilitator at Henley, structuring programmes in political intelligence, empathy and self-disruption for executives.
“Disruption” is a word that appeals greatly to Vlismas.
“Take these new versions of super-capitalists that are running Silicon Valley — they are super-dangerous because they have not only data but the means to analyse it quickly. And all these big buggers are just sitting with massive structures, they’ve got lots of data and they’ve got lots of old systems but they don’t have anyone disruptive at the helm, and there’s so much invested in it that they can’t ever admit that it’s not optimum.
“Then you’ve got the dominance of poisonous corporate male white culture, and then you’ve got the dissonance of young black rising talent — I was talking to a friend of mine whose parents still live in a rural situation, and he said: ‘We’ve been raised with this conservatism that’s based on a certain way of life, then we go to the city and now we want this life, but we have to go home to reconnect with values and there’s a disconnect between those worlds.’ So you’re dealing with that already, and now you’ve got to deal with Dave Johnson and his Prado and his golf membership . . . how do you connect all this s**t?
“You use empathy and you learn to be a bit more human and then, by questioning how you might feel, you’re able to cross that divide.
“I also talk a lot about the value of arguing.”
Offending Australians
And with that we are back to the brain. Vlismas cites the example of someone who loses the use of his arm but regains the ability to move the arm once the brain finds other ways of sending messages to the afflicted limb.
“That’s neuroplasticity, and if your brain is capable of finding a new path when one pathway has been damaged in terms of physical functioning, why can we not use the same brain ability to rebuild pathways from whiteness to blackness and vice versa . . . I’m trying to find a connection in all that.”
Fear, he says, might be described as a type of stroke, an occlusion that shuts down the possibility of connecting to unfamiliar concepts or people. These are the things he is pondering, and on which he hopes to concentrate when he does a post-MBA doctorate.
“The business school is fantastic,” he says.
“The dean, Jonathan Foster-Pedley, is an amazing teacher and the reason I started learning again. He’s all about creative strategy and disruption. He allows this kind of mad exploration of ideas. Hopefully as I go further with this, I’m going to be able to link actual academic backing to what I’m talking about.”
There might seem to be a rift between this kind of thinking and making people laugh, but Vlismas says it has added depth to his comedy.
“I thought they were separate things,” he says.
“I want to be doing something else when I’m in my 50s and I wondered whether I’d have to get out of one thing completely and into something else. It is a huge effort doing everything, it’s exhausting, but when I went to Australia recently just to do stand-up it was like this incredible shot in the arm.”
He toured with a group of younger comics and confesses that he was assailed by “imposter syndrome” — where you think you’re actually no good and one day you’re going to be found out.
“It’s very common,” he says.
“Allegedly it’s also a sign of high functioning, and apparently idiots don’t get it, so that’s quite reassuring.”
And everything was, of course, all right on the night.
“It turned into the most phenomenal tour. Everybody was on fire.” Doing comedy in another country is a process of trial and error, a matter of testing the boundaries of a different audience. Australians are easily offended, he says, but that didn’t stop Vlismas from pushing their buttons.
“I talked about this friend in a wheelchair who doesn’t go to comedy any more because everyone else puts pressure on him to be offended. It’s almost like this offence bomb that goes off around his wheelchair — but he’s not that guy. Then when I break it down for the audience suddenly they’re laughing at wheelchair jokes because they understand it from his point of view. It was their own prejudice that stopped them from laughing and made him feel bad, when actually out of everyone who should be cheered up about wheelchair jokes, it’s him.
“So now I’m able to explain why I make the wheelchair joke, and that’s quite cool. I think that’s one way my comedy has progressed, I can take people a bit further along the journey rather than just drop them at the end.
“One of the protected functions of art, among its various roles in society, is to shock, offend and disturb. Those are legitimate outcomes of an artistic experience.
“Like with Dad: he’s had a stroke, he’s lying there and he knows he’s had a stroke, so we joke with him and make very inappropriate jokes and actually that’s where they’re useful. It’s not about what’s polite. Comedy must be horror’s neighbour.”
This ability to make light of darkness is something of a family trait. Vlismas says they were concerned about how his small nephew
(son of his equally gifted commercials-director sister Dani Hynes) would react to seeing Grandad after his stroke.
“It was a bit uneasy to start with,” he says.
“There’s Dad pretending he hasn’t had a stroke but actually he has had a stroke . . . and then my nephew did his perfect impression of the flossing dance and Dad burst out laughing. So it all worked out quite well.”
Brain Dump, John Vlismas’s new one-man comedy show, runs at the Pieter Toerien Theatre at Montecasino, Johannesburg, from Wednesday July 11 to August 12. Book at Computicket.