★★★★
Sometimes the best way to get through a tragedy is to laugh at it. And that’s exactly what Macedonian comedian Vlad Ilich does as he takes his audience through the story of his early experiences of the Macedonian insurgency in 2001. The little-known war closed his childhood chess club, and ever since, Ilich has been out for revenge. Despite being a well known name on the London comedy circuit, Ilich makes his Edinburgh debut this year at the Pleasance Courtyard.
Ilich enters the room to traditional Italian working class song ‘Bella Ciao!’, but with a small audience of eight, it doesn’t quite land. Still, that doesn’t dull Ilich’s enthusiasm and he launches straight into the story about his early life in North Macedonia, interspersed with references to Soviet Bambi and the Lion King and Ilich’s experiences of growing up in Eastern Europe and Russian expansionism, dubbing Macedonia “future Russia”.
His comedy educates. I was unaware that there had been a war between Macedonia and Albania, for example and with great skill, Ilich cleverly compares this to two children fighting over who had water and who did not.
There are also, for a one hour long comedy show, a lot of jokes about NATO which Ilich calls “No Action, Talk Over” and questions how they handled the conflict. He tells the audience of his mother’s reaction to the NATO intervention, vowing never to watch Sex in the City again due to her hatred of the Americans. Ilich said: “She watched the local version instead: Handjob in the Rubble.”
Eventually his family moved out of Macedonia to Malta, which brought a new language to contend with after a misunderstanding over the Maltese word for vegetables (hashish).
He took up chess which he played with his father who he said “always beat me…and then we played chess”.
Ilich’s strength lies in his subtle one liners which bamboozle his audience into delayed laughter. He has a talent for visceral metaphors, describing someone puking up orange bile as being “like chicken tikka” while he was getting to grips with the UK’s drinking culture upon moving here, a phenomenon he described simply as “culture”.
Ilich got his name, he said, from the song ‘What is Love?’ which was in the charts around the time of his birth.
Contending with the culture shock of moving to the UK also forms a big part of Ilich’s routine, where he describes the phenomenon of “cash back”.
“No wonder all the immigrants want to come here,” he said, but then realised what it was after having no money for the bus the following day. He tells the audience about his neighbour asking him if the name Vlad was “Like Vladimir Putin”.
“That’s not very nice,” Ilich said, “What’s your name buddy?”
”Jim.”
”Oh, like Jimmy Saville?” Which got the best laugh of the evening.
There is a charm in Ilich’s self-deprecating observational humour. He is certainly one to watch in the coming years at Edinburgh, with the potential to become one of the great household names of the festival in years to come.
Vlad Ilich performs Vladislav: Baby, Don’t Hurt Me at the Pleasance Courtyard – Attic at 8.30pm until 25th August (not 14th)
Words by Lauren Gilmour
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