Soho Theatre Regular Kanan Gill Makes Edinburgh Fringe Debut This Summer

Soho Theatre regular Kanan Gill will make his Fringe debut this summer, following his hit UK tour (Southbank Centre and Union Chapel, London, Birmingham, Salford and Glasgow), and Most Outstanding Show nomination at this year’s Melbourne International Comedy Festival. What Is This? is presented by Soho Theatre in association with UTA. Kanan is one of seven Indian comics Soho Theatre brings to the festival this year. He joins last year’s Best Newcomer Urooj Ashfaq, International Emmy Award-winner Vir Das, India’s most subscribed mentalistSuhani Shah, and Rahul Subramanian, Sumukhi Suresh and Anirban Dasgupta, who also make their Edinburgh debuts.

What are the ways of being in the world — can you manage to be here now, or are you busy then? India’s stand-up star Kanan examines the many ways of being, the very idea of being and the ultimately unsatisfactory nature of experience. With jokes. Yes. This is a comedy show, and if you believe descriptions, it’s very, very funny.

London audiences first met Kanan in 2019 when he performed in the Soho Theatre Comedy Tent, a regular fixture at the annual Diwali in the Square. He performed at Soho Theatre later in the year and returned with a sold-out 2-week run in 2021.

Originally a software engineer, Kanan rose to fame with the YouTube series Pretentious Movie Reviews, reviewing flawed yesteryear Bollywood films. His partner-in-comedy running this wildly popular series is fellow stand-up Biswa Kalyan Rath. Rising awareness led to working on an improvised sketch comedy The Living Room on Comedy Central. He ventured into Bollywood films in 2017 with a major role in the movie Noor starring Sonakshi Sinha. Kanan wrote Keep It Real for Amazon Prime Video released in 2017. He judged India’s first comedy reality show Comicstaan, along with top comedians Abish Matthew, Biswa Kalyan Rath, Kaneez Surka, Kenny Sebastian, Naveen Richards, Sapan Verma, Sumukhi Suresh and Tanmay Bhat. In 2018 Kanan, along with fellow comedian Kenny Sebastian, co-wrote and created live sketch comedy Sketchy Behaviour which toured India and was released in 2019 on Amazon Prime Video.

Kanan has toured extensively across India and around the world in Singapore, Hong Kong, Dubai, Doha, Bangkok, Vietnam, the UK, The Netherlands, North America and Australia. Kanan Gill: What Is This? follows his previous special Is This It? (it was, and the full length special is on YouTube). His recent Most Outstanding Show nomination at the Melbourne International Comedy Festival marks the first time an Indian comic has been nominated for this award. Earlier this year Kanan released his debut novel Acts of God, described as channelling the craft of Neil Gaiman, the humour of Douglas Adams, and the genius of Terry Pratchett. Last year he appeared in the film Christmas As Usual, a Norwegian romantic comedy directed by Petter Holmsen, starring Ida Ursin-Holm, which is available on Netflix.

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