David Kau

David Kau is one of South Africa’s premier stand-up comedians, a filmmaker, and a social entrepreneur. He burst onto the comedy scene in 1998 with an appearance at the Smirnoff Comedy Festival in Cape Town, becoming the first-ever black person to perform at the festival in the process. Later that same year, he began touring his first one-man show, Rainbow Nation, which he performed across South Africa for two years. More recently, during the pandemic, he has been regularly live-streaming on his YouTube channel for its 16,000 subscribers. He is also particularly active across Twitter and Instagram, with nearly 1 million fans across both platforms.

Kau originally hadn’t planned a career in comedy. In 1995, he’d begun studying for a degree in Electrical Engineering at the University of Cape Town. A year later, however, he dropped it and switched to Acting, with an emphasis on Speech and Drama. He wrote his Rainbow Nation show as part of his course, but after his groundbreaking Smirnoff Comedy Festival appearance (where he was not only the first black performer but also the only black performer on a bill of more than 40 comedians), it became a national hit. He followed it up in 2000 with a politically-charged play, Introducing the People’s Comic.

In 2004, he wrote and starred in The Pure Monate Show (PMS), an innovative comedy sketch show that ran for two seasons. He has since written and directed several TV movies, including The Room Divider, Shampoo’s Retirement Village, Mmamoriri, and Mmamoriri 2: Back in the Weave.