Interview: Kazakhstan’s Dinara Kerey on Borat, the Boundaries of Humor, and International Stand-Up

In just four years, Dinara Kerey has gone from performing at open mics to staging her own stand-up shows across Europe, North America, and Central Asia, including a tour of her solo show Crazy Eurasian. Born in Kazakhstan, she left the country at 17, studied in South Korea and the United States, and now lives in Berlin, where she works in IT and performs comedy in English, Russian, and German. At a show in Vancouver, she found an immediate connection with Kazakhs living abroad. In other rooms, she says, her first jokes must explain that she is from Kazakhstan. The Times of Central Asia spoke with Kerey about cultural boundaries in comedy, Borat’s portrayal of Kazakhstan, the fear of being seen, and the cost of building a career largely on her own. TCA: Dinara, you sometimes perform eight or nine shows a month and have appeared in Kazakhstan, Germany, Canada, the United Kingdom, and Turkey, though you’ve only been doing stand-up for four years. Do you feel popular? Dinara Kerey: For me, this is just the beginning. My schedule is busy because I want it to be busy. I organize all my shows myself, so it’s entirely up to me. Right now, for example, I’m heading home to Berlin after touring Kazakhstan, where I did an English-language show for 150 people. TCA: Were most of the people in the audience foreigners or locals? Kerey: There were a lot of foreigners, but most of the audience was Kazakh. They were well-educated, English-speaking young people. And there was this funny thing; after the show, a lot of them came up to me and we kept speaking English, even though both sides knew perfectly well that we could speak another language. Maybe some of them just wanted the practice. TCA: What kind of reception do you get back home? And where have you found particularly warm audiences? Kerey: The reception at home is good, especially in Almaty, which is nice. But I’d also single out Vancouver. More than 90 people came to my show there, and around 40 of them were Kazakhs who had been living there for a long time. I’ve lived abroad for 14 years myself, so there was an immediate connection with them, this shared relatability. Pretty much all my jokes landed really well. I guess we have similar backgrounds and look at life from the same angles: as immigrants, as Kazakhs, as Asians, and ultimately as post-Soviet people, or Eastern Europeans, as people tend to say now. All those different parts of me matched up with them. TCA: Did the material resonate with the other Canadians as well? Kerey: Yes. The people who came to my show had similar experiences. They were very well-traveled and had also moved from country to country before finding a place they could call home. I think the difference was especially noticeable because in Canada, more than anywhere else I’ve been, people celebrate their differences. They may be Canadian by passport, but nobody demands...