‘I am as good as any of these comedians,’ says funny girl Gilli Apter

During lockdown Gilli Apter entertained me every day.

Her highly mobile features and whip-smart comedic observations were a high point of my Instagram habit. Her daily video post was a happy and necessary distraction from the relentless pandemic.  

Kleinsky’s, the bagel caravan on the side of the road in Birdhaven, Johannesburg, an outpost from the Seapoint original, served a similar role in Gilli’s life. It is entirely understandable. These bagels are insanely good in an understated way.  

Fresh, tart and stuffed with delight. A bit like the stand-up comedian whose show on Netflix, Only Jokes Allowed,  has recently taken her brand of humour to a much broader audience. She is about to fly off to London to proceed apace with what she calls  “the process of my world takeover”.  She is only half kidding.

Her international tour is about to kick off in London. “I am about to turn 40.  I can’t wait.  I toured in London recently and the onstage experience was so mind blowing and so affirming. We think as South Africans that we are so far away from the hubs where this kind of creative work takes place that we might not measure up. Then you go on a London stage and you realise — Oh, I am as good as any of these comedians, and it is very life affirming.”  

We unwrap our bagels. Mine is a California roll take on the classic salmon and cream cheese, hers is pastrami on rye. “I started coming here during lockdown for coffee. I like an easy thing, you can park your car and get your bagel.”

I wonder when her comedic muse spoke to her. “I was always meant to be doing this, I have always been funny. I went to film school to make comedy TV  and then I got strong-armed for long enough by other people to do stand-up. It always felt like something I should be doing and one day somebody gave me the opportunity and I started, and since then I have always aggressively taken up whatever space is available to me because I have always been in a huge hurry.”  

How has she dealt with being a female comedian in an overwhelmingly male space? “It’s been hard but it’s not just hard, you also have an advantage — you have to overcome how hard it is to be a woman in that space to take advantage of the advantage you have.”

Meaning?

“When there is a line-up of six men and one woman, you have an advantage to shine. The disadvantage is that they don’t expect you to be funny because you are a woman. So if you are good, then you can prove them wrong. But already you are going on stage trying to prove people wrong as opposed to them expecting you to be funny. You are coming on trying to change their perception. But it is the underdog story of if you do well, then great.  The question is can you withstand that and can you do it long enough to get good?

“The problem is always at the beginning, when you are not good yet, because they don’t attribute not being good to being new, they attribute it to being a woman. They don’t notice that three of the seven guys also failed.” 

But Gilli has a highly original mind and so can flip the narrative. “I have  a lot of privileges — they always have to have a woman on the line-up — but it’s a f-up because they can’t have two women on the line-up. There is a lot to be said for the fact that everybody struggles in some way in this industry. I am so privileged in so many other ways — I have so many advantages.  I have a car, I can drive myself to gigs.  I had a career before this so I can afford to not get paid for so many gigs.

“What I love about stand-up is basically you know the feeling you get where you say the right thing at the right moment — think about what it does for your soul. You can live on that for weeks. Now multiply it.”

Where does she believe the impulse to laugh comes from?  “The trigger is about recognition — recognising something that has not been articulated in a way that has made it clear before.  It is something  we may be feeling,  or we’ve  seen, or we’ve noticed and the minute it is brought into focus and made clear, your brain instantly recognises it as funny. Comedians clarify the world, and sometimes more than that is not needed . You can use it politically for anything, I guess, but I often say if you have an agenda as a comedian that isn’t just to make people laugh, it will always get in the way of your comedy.”