Comedian Schalk Bezuidenhout: ‘At 30, you suddenly find yourself out of the loop...’

Following a successful 2023, with a critically-acclaimed run at the Edinburgh Fringe and a debut UK tour – as well as a second Netflix comedy special – South African comedian Schalk Bezuidenhout is to bring his Keeping Up tour to Cambridge.

Schalk, who is also a trained actor, has enjoyed sold-out runs at London’s Leicester Square Theatre, Soho Theatre and Edinburgh Festival Fringe, as well as opening for fellow South African comic Trevor Noah – one of his comedy heroes – in 2015 and 2017.

He has also performed in Australia, at the Melbourne International Comedy Festival and Adelaide Festival, as well as in Perth, Sydney and Brisbane.

Schalk (pronounced ‘Skalk’) is originally from Kempton Park, near Johannesburg, but now calls the city of Durban home.

He spoke to the Cambridge Independent via Zoom from Edinburgh, however, where he had gone to perform – for the fifth time – at the Edinburgh Fringe.

“I think it’s quite a refreshing take on things,” says Schalk of Keeping Up, “because I think in general the kind of narrative in comedy is to be pushing boundaries quite heavily and everything, which I think Keeping Up does, in a different way.

“But part of the narrative of Keeping Up is that I kind of keep up in this world because I’m actually quite prudish – and prudish not to be confused with bigoted, because I think a lot of times people associate prudish with conservative or bigoted.

“But South Africans – and Afrikaans people, more specifically – we grow up quite prudish. So in this very fast-paced, fast-changing world, it’s trying to keep up with everything.

“And there’s definitely a willingness to keep up, but then sometimes you do get left behind and it takes a bit of brain power to keep up with everything.

“But it’s a really fun show; my comedy in general, it’s not out to make people angry, or challenge people quite aggressively, it’s to give a fresh take on something and just for it to be a really fun hour of comedy.”

In the show’s accompanying blurb, it states that Keeping Up is also to do with the recently-married 32-year-old struggling to ‘keep up’ with the youth of today.

“Yes, definitely. I think people in their early 30s… I see a lot of memes about it on social media; it’ll be like an old man with a young child and it’ll say: ‘Me at the age of 30 chatting to my friends who are in their 20s’.

“Because it’s like an overnight thing, the same as how when you turn 21... you were like a child, you were in high school, and then suddenly you turn 20, 21 and you’re in this new life phase.

“You mess around in your 20s and you’re kind of like a lost traveller going through life and it’s all fun and exciting, and then you suddenly reach 30 and then people are getting married and babies and tax suddenly becomes a very real thing.

“In your 20s, I don’t know how we all did it but somehow we just managed to ignore tax – it was just something that sorted itself out!

“And you start, at the age of 30, very quickly finding yourself out of the loop. You suddenly see these TikTok trends that you go ‘Oh, is this a new thing?’ and then someone will be like ‘No, that’s been around for a year’ and you’re like ‘Jeez, OK, I don’t know where I’ve been’.”

Schalk, who started doing stand-up back in 2011 while he was still a student living at home, performed Keeping Up at last year’s Edinburgh Fringe.

A lot of people have come to see his latest show, Crowd Pleaser, at this year’s event, he reveals, “because Keeping Up, they say, was one of their favourite shows last year at the festival – so that’s very refreshing to hear, obviously”.

Schalk is a big fan of American stand-up John Mulaney, and also says he feels “so inspired” by the Australian comedians he’s seen when he’s been over there on tour, adding: “The Aussie comics are creating their own genres.

“So many comedians that you see there don’t fit into any specific genre, because it’s not just normal, straight stand-up, but it’s also not quite clowning…

“It’s satirical but it isn’t… and you just can’t put them into a box. So many of them merge so many different styles to a point where they just create their own style, so I really love the Aussie comedians.”

See Schalk Bezuidenhout live on stage at the Cambridge Junction (J2) on Wednesday, 2 October.

Tickets, priced £18, are available from junction.co.uk. For more on Schalk, go to schalkbezuidenhout.com.