It's an informal pre-rehearsal workshop for Three Wiser Men, sequel to last year's sell-out, Three Wise Men. I'm at the Victoria Junction Hotel lounge, looking forward to witnessing three of Cape Town's funniest mickey-takers in brainstorm action, when the bombshell drops. It will be Two Wiser Men - Marc Lottering and Nik Rabinowitz. Riaad Moosa is playing truant.
Marc Lottering, Nik Rabinowitz and Riaad Moosa (clockwise) Cape Town's mickey-takers
Rabinowitz can't resist sending Moosa up. "Riaad's putting his new baby to bed. If you phone you'll get this hushed voice" - he puts on a hoarse comic whisper - "Can't talk now..."As it happens Rabinowitz is about to become a father himself, a role already providing the 33-year-old with endless comic mileage. "I told Riaad if he gives his son a Hebrew name, we'll call ours Moegamat Rabinowitz. This is not just about becoming a father. It's about peace in the Middle East."
Voted this year's best stand-up comedian, Rabinowitz has a business science degree, speaks Xhosa and is an accents specialist. When he phoned a Sydney radio station pretending to be Caster Semenya's father, they were totally taken in. He presents The Week That Wasn't for 702 and Cape Talk and is a voice on Zapiro's political puppet satire ZA News, which was canned by the SABC but now appears on its own website www.zanews.co.za.
The third wise man has made an art of Capie self-mockery, mining the rich seam of SA weirdness that was Marc Lottering growing up in Grassy Park. He has only to walk on to a stage in Sydney, London, Auckland or Toronto, and drawl "Hoezit my broe?" for the entire place to start screaming with delight.
"I nearly stayed on in Oz. I applied for refugee status," he says with a straight face. "I told them I was in danger of being attacked by white people in SA, and the state wouldn't protect me."
Lottering and Rabinowitz em-ceed a Fifa delegates' conference not long ago at Arabella golf estate near Hermanus. Rabinowitz presided at the auction.
"It was a community fund-raiser. Two men were going head-on for tickets to the matches - the chief of Coca-Cola America and an Indian dude from Chatsworth - and the Auction Alliance woman was revving the South African up: Come on boet! Don't be snoep!' So finally the charra got it. He paid R700 000. A steal!"
At which point Lottering turns to me and says with his rubbery smile: "Please write it was Nik who said charra'. I want to be booked by Fifa next year."
He's joking, but he's had bitter experience of how iffy corporates can get. A few years ago someone started impersonating him online, e-mailing one-liners headlined "Why coloureds can't be terrorists." The giveaway was that the impersonator spelt Marc's name with a K. But not many people noticed. And even though Lottering insisted it wasn't him, some corporate s stopped using him for fear of offending coloured executives.
Rabinowitz has his own story. "I was talking on a show about how the best way to learn a language is on the pillow, and thinking long-term about black kugels I happened to use the term Xhosa Lite. The next day I had a woman walk up to me." He puts on a Xhosa accent: " You are disgusting!' she says."
Disgust is not a usual reaction even though not much is sacred for this Christian-Jewish-Muslim trio. What made their first Wise Men show so successful is that it attracted these three audiences, and each got the biggest kicks out of the bits that sent their own groups up.
Of course the director, David Kramer, has an eagle comedy eye.
"David is really into finding the funny," says Lottering.
"It can be a great political statement but it's got to be damn funny or it's out," says Rabinowitz.
They do part of the show in their own stand-up personas and the rest as comedy sketches. One of the funniest - repeated in a different format this year - is the tea party held by their alter egos. There's Lottering's Auntie Merle of Belgravia Road in Athlone and Moosa's Aysha, who is Auntie Merle's neighbour, and they sit down to tea in the flat of Rabinowitz's Sea Point kugel Beryl Rosenberg.
"Aysha's husband did some work in Beryl's apartment, which is how the women got together," says Lottering. "There are all kinds of backstories we play with, including the fact that Auntie Merle knows Beryl has been on Prozac because Aysha's husband told Aysha."
- Three Wiser Men is on at the Baxter in Cape Town until January 9.
Ranking the Analysts 2009
