Live From New York, It’s South Africa’s Loyiso Gola!

Vimeo has given birth to the webseries High Maintenance, which made the jump this year to HBO, and in the past year has hosted comedy specials for Garfunkel and Oates: Trying to Be Special (earning an Emmy nomination for original music and lyrics) and the premiere for the Crash Test rolling bus tour hosted by Paul Scheer and Rob Huebel.

But Loyiso Gola: Live in New York is the first traditional solo stand-up special for Vimeo, premiering today as a “Vimeo Original.”

If you can consider stand-up from a South African, filmed performing in late September in Bushwick, Brooklyn, then delivered as a finished, edited product for you to consume seven weeks later, on a streaming platform you wouldn’t normally seek out for any of those things, could be considered traditional. As Gola told me last week for my podcast, The Comic’s Comic Presents Last Things First: “So it’s like if you said, if someone said, ‘Krispy Kreme was making cars.’ You’d be like, ‘Oh, man.’” Gola had seen content on Vimeo before, so he knew what the platform was capable of, just not in terms of stand-up comedy.

“The thing that I was excited about was the idea of being the first. And also, because I think my perspective is quite different from what would exist in other platforms. Just the subject matter that I talk about in the special and my angles on the thing. So when I thought about it, it was fitting.”

Americans have come to know and get used to seeing South Africa’s Trevor Noah as host of The Daily Show on Comedy Central. Gola, nine months older than Noah, already was famous in their native country for hosting his own satirical TV series since 2010, Late Nite News with Loyiso Gola, earning International Emmy Award nominations in 2013 and 2014.

Apartheid ended in South Africa when Gola was nine. “I don’t remember a time when I was told I couldn’t be anything,” Gola told me. But his mother suffered. “She experienced that kind of oppression.”

By the time Gola could embark on his career, stand-up comedy and satire were still new concepts for many of his countrymen and women: “If you’re good in these parts of the world, you just get to plug into the system that already exists. When I was coming up, we were creating the opportunities ourselves. We were building the industry ourselves. We were figuring out how we were going to commercialize the idea of standing on stage and telling jokes. How were we going to convince people this was an actual thing, because it sounds, if you explain what stand-up comedy is to a person who’s never experienced it, it’s such a crazy thing to do.”

For Gola, success came first through appearing in a locally-produced sketch comedy series, then panel series, game shows and other appearances, which built up his recognition enough to tour as a stand-up, and later launch Late Nite News.

“If you’re watching SNL from Soweto, you’re watching it and you go, oh this is funny…Now if I talk about something that person resonates with immediately, I connect more than the biggest sketch show in the world,” he said.

Gola remembered seeing Bill Maher on Oprah in the late 1990s, when he was hosting Politically Incorrect. “I really liked the idea of a show like that. I was young. I wasn’t even doing stand-up, but I was like, oh this is such, I wish we had a show like that. So when I was a big stand-up back home, that idea was stuck in the back of my head. I need to do a show like that. I like the idea of delving into current-affairs issues.”

Which he does and then some in his new Vimeo special, Live in New York.

Gola isn’t ready to move to America just yet. He wants to keep his unique outsider perspectives, and also to help expand Americans views on a global comedy scale.

“I just hope this advertises what the rest of the world’s comedians can do. There’s a lot of comedians all over the world that are really funny, and I hope I break that mold of Americans just watching Americans,” he said. “People are also looking for something new to listen to. People want to hear what the person in India or Sri Lanka or Nigeria has to say, and I’m a South African, and I have ideas that I want to share with America.”

[Watch Loyiso Gola: Live In New York on Vimeo]

Sean L. McCarthy works the comedy beat for his own digital newspaper, The Comic’s Comic; before that, for actual newspapers. Based in NYC but will travel anywhere for the scoop: Ice cream or news. He also tweets @thecomicscomic and podcasts half-hour episodes with comedians revealing origin stories: The Comic’s Comic Presents Last Things First.