Kurt Schoonraad has spent close to three decades turning the everyday chaos of South African life, family, ageing, relationships, the small daily frustrations everyone recognises, into a career.
Along the way he has built the Cape Town Comedy Club into one of the Top 10 Comedy Clubs in the world, shared stages with prominent comedians John Cleese, Russell Peters and Pauly Shore, and become one of the country’s most recognisable comic voices across stand-up, television, film and theatre, with credits including “Going Nowhere Slowly” and “Comedy Central Presents Kurt Schoonraad”.
After recent shows in Cape Town and Gqeberha, he is bringing his latest one man show, “Funny Side Up”, to The Capital Empire in Sandton for one night, Friday September 11 2026.
Speaking to “The National”, Schoonraad described his comedy not as something he writes, but as something that passes through him.
“I consider myself a comedy medium. The comedy comes through me, not from me. Whatever is happening in the world, in society, online, on the streets, in the shopping mall, goes through this comedy filter in my system, and something comedic comes out the other side,” he said.
“I don’t even know how it happens, to be quite honest. It just does. And it’s fantastic. I get to jot it down, and then we talk about it,” he admitted.
He called it a form of therapy too, a way of finding solutions by working through whatever is bothering him on stage.
“You take whatever life throws at you, put it through the filter, and hopefully something funny comes out the other side.”
“Funny Side Up” started as a conversation between Schoonraad and fellow comedian David Levinsohn. Schoonraad had been telling him stories about his father, a man he calls Uncle Noel, material he assumed was too personal for the stage.
Levinsohn disagreed. “He said, ‘Why is this not on stage?’ I said, ‘Because it’s quite personal stuff; I don’t think it will work on stage.’ And he said, ‘No, this is exactly the stuff that should be on stage. This is honesty,’” Schoonraad recalled.
Levinsohn ended up directing the show, with Schoonraad writing the stories.
Years of touring the country and turning lemons to lemonade with his life lessons had also taught him that South African audiences are not one audience. Speaking on his recent shows in Cape Town and Gqeberha, Schoonraad details just how different each city is.
“The cities in South Africa are completely different. They are almost different countries in a way,” he said. Johannesburg, in particular, amused him.
“There’s really no other city in the world where, if the robots aren’t working, you’ll have homeless people directing traffic. It’s just unusual!” Joburg crowds, he said, come out to go all in.
“They just want to go out and have the best time. They want to scream with laughter.”
Gqeberha, by contrast, barely has a rush hour. “When they do, it lasts about an hour. It’s literally peak hour. In Johannesburg, you can get stuck in traffic for hours at a time.”
Cape Town, meanwhile, he described as “Africa on training wheels”, more reserved, more Eurocentric, “a little more discerning”. He shared that after 25 years, he has learned to read the room and understand the city he’s in, and adjust accordingly.
Born in District Six and raised in Mitchells Plain, that background shaped his perspective from the start.
Looking back on his journey from Mitchells Plain to founding the Cape Town Comedy Club and sharing stages with global comedy icons, Schoonraad shared what keeps driving his passion for stand-up comedy.
“It’s amazing because the longer you’re in this, the simpler it becomes. The complications are often added by the public or the audience, but the truth is, we’re all just human beings wanting to tell our stories. Comedians are storytellers. That’s really all we are,” he said.
For the Johannesburg crowd at his upcoming show, he said he was not aiming for much more than that. He said he hopes the crowd takes away a great story. “Just an honest, lekker, funny, human story,” he said.
“Where you’re sitting there thinking, I’ve felt that way, I’ve done that, I’ve been there, and maybe, in some small way, a celebration of your parents and your family, a celebration of who we are, and ultimately, a celebration of our differences,” he added.
nomathamsanqa.sithathu@nationalmg.co.za