This is a REALLY funny monkey

Evaldas Karosas picks his comedy favourites

Lithuanian comedian Evaldas Karosas – currently performing his Edinburgh Fringe show A Very Capable Man at Monkey Barrel Cabaret Voltaire at 7.10pm – picks his Perfect Playlist of comedy favourites…

First street joke I ever heard

I remember feeling dizzy, as a child, when I realised that street jokes actually had authors. It felt to me like jokes belonged to the world the same way sand, or clouds, or plants do - you couldn’t come up with one anymore than you could invent a tree. They sprang out of people almost unconsciously and then spread around like pollen carried by a bee.

When I finally discovered that people wrote jokes for a living, this job seemed like that of a magician, wishing things into being. I’d pay good money to know who wrote the first street joke I ever heard:

‘A little boy discovers he has lice and hits on an ingenious plan. "Tomorrow I'll just put my head next to another kid's head, and my lice will jump over." The next day he does it. He comes home pleased with himself, lays his head on the pillow, and overhears the lice talking: "What a battle! We won! And brought back so many prisoners!"'

Dragon Ball Z

I sometimes train at a callisthenics gym in a park, where the men sort themselves into groups by where they're from, and the only exchanges we have are polite gym business.

Not long ago someone set up a speaker and put on the Dragon Ball Z theme. The walls between us came down like it was Berlin in 1989. ‘Gohan Versus Cell,’ someone said, and we were all transported back to our family homes, glued to a world as real as the school we'd just come from, except now we're not alone. We're surrounded by apparitions of other boys feeling exactly what we feel, on the other side of the world.

The feeling didn’t last, and soon after there was a fist fight, but it’s nice to know that if a show goes deep enough, it can touch everybody.

Monkey in an ad

This is a really funny monkey. The harmonies drop and it opens its eyes, as if visited by an epiphany or a sense of unity between itself and everything outside it. What are you thinking about, monkey? Is it bananas? Either way it makes me laugh, and I can only wish my own comedy carried that much weight.

Kung Pow: Enter The Fist

Here's how this film was made: the director (also the lead) took a 1976 Hong Kong kung-fu flick, mustered every scrap of technology available in 2002, inserted himself INTO the movie, and redubbed the original cast in his own voice.

If you think that sounds kind of racist, you're absolutely right. It got 13 per cent on Rotten Tomatoes, where the consensus was that it's a great idea for a three-minute sketch and excruciating at feature length. Then it came out on DVD, got chopped into clips, posted online, and found its audience (me). Now it's a cult classic.

I fall into periods of hating social media for making me think in ‘hooks' and ‘clickbaits’ and ‘short formats,’ and I conveniently forget that almost everything I love most, things so niche it feels like I manifested them, or like they were made for an audience of one, I found through an algorithm.

Some of the best opportunities feel like a curse when you fail to crack them.

That one guy who put fake subtitles on 37 episodes of a Japanese TV show

Building on the last one: when I was 15 or so I found a YouTuber with basically no views who put fake subtitles on a Japanese TV show. He didn't speak Japanese. He just made up subtitles off the top of his head, inventing his own plot to make the show funny.

I consumed more than 20 hours of this nonsense. My grandma once asked, ‘What are you watching?’ I didn't even try to explain.

I'm not claiming he shaped my humour or influenced me as a person, but it feels like he did something. He created a little universe just for me and a dozen others. In a world obsessed with numbers, a dozen people is nothing. It didn't feel like nothing when I was waiting for the next episode to drop.

While writing this I managed to find him online. He went on to write sci-fi novels. I found 43 ratings on Goodreads and thought, damn, such a shame. But then, for all I know, those 43 people found in his books exactly what I took from his YouTube videos.

Stewart Lee’s Pear Cider bit

As an artist, you consume, and then you imitate. You find someone you admire, you copy their style, you become almost a parody of them, and then you shed the influence like a snake sheds its skin. Go through that enough times and it forges your own voice. My comedy is me merged with the styles of fifty other comedians I wish I was.

But once in a while you stumble on something so unique it shakes your understanding of what your own art can do. That's what happened when I watched this Stewart Lee bit. It seemed almost unfair. ‘Why did no one tell me you could do this? Have I wasted my life?’

I'd go to my writing sessions hyper-aware of my own process, of the thought patterns I used to hunt for jokes, and I'd think: ‘I bet Stewart Lee doesn't think like this. Maybe I should be thinking differently too.’

And so I would spend hours thinking about writing rather than writing. I tell myself this made me better, but I can’t prove it yet.