I saw Luca Ravenna perform for the first time in 2017 at Pierrot Le Fou in Rome together with Stefano Rapone and Daniele Tinti. I didn’t really know what stand-up comedy was but some videos of him had appeared on my Facebook wall shared by I don’t know some friends and so I asked him for friendship, finding traces of these evenings in which we sat on the floor and he laughed like crazy. There must have been twenty or thirty of us, then Luca and I met at a football match, we played tennis together and every now and then we still talk to comment mainly on the Grand Slam tournaments. On Monday 8 April I went to the Teatro delle Celebrazioni in Bologna to see it Red Sox, his latest show. Upon entering the queue – very long, the evening had been sold out for weeks – I felt a strong impression that there was a specific and limited group of Millennials at the theatre, the one included in the range of those born between the mid-80s and mid 90s. For events, Bologna is an ecumenical city, for stand-up comedy even more so because it offers the largest possible pool of non-residents, former non-residents who have become permanent residents, and the Bolognese who always like going to the theater. Before the show started I remembered why I was there.
In 2018 I saw Luca Ravenna’s first full show at the Alcazar in Rome. In the Ghetto it had amused me a lot, because all the things that would later become Ravenna were already present: situational monologues, told with a long breath and colored by important facial expressions and the use of voices. From the first songs, Ravenna always enjoys imitating Italian accents, parodying her parents’ voices and even launching into some imitations. I remember going out and walking around Trastevere thinking that it had been a nice evening but that maybe I expected more. It wasn’t dissatisfaction, more the feeling of having woken up from a good dinner still hungry. I saw it again in Rome in 2020, then I went to the theater for Rodrigo LIVE, his post-participation tour in LOL. This was the ditch that dug a before and after in his career, at least from the point of view of popularity. To say that he did not feel at ease in that context is superfluous, but I believe that that participation meant two things: empathy on the part of those who followed him and already knew him, curiosity for those who met him there, giving a monologue and little more before being eliminated.
In 2022 I went to follow him for 568 at the Estragon in Bologna. The audience, still and composed, neatly wore Ffp2 masks without empty seats to distance themselves. Ravenna’s growth was constant and each show raised the bar a little, both in terms of the craft with which he conducted the monologue and in terms of the contents he put into it. There was in the middle Cashmere Podcast together with Edoardo Ferrario and the various sports formats (TAQ And Sports antenna) with Daniele Tinti. A career that I have always followed constantly until Monday evening, when I realized that Luca Ravenna is the best storyteller of the Millennial generation.
I had already had the first inkling that Ravenna was something generational from his previous tour – 568 – especially while he was talking about dinners for thirty-year-olds, all couples, all with “problems”, perhaps even their first children. Inside real houses, not attics or top floors with the terrace in Ozpetek. Beyond the laughter, I was left with a trace of melancholy taken from my true story and that of all my dearest friends. With that piece Ravenna had taken a photograph: that of young people forever out of office who elect themselves to adoptive and extended families for other young flowers home forever, and just like in a family they love each other but also hate each other, sometimes they get hurt they endure, they send barbs at each other.
Even more irreverent and more direct was one of the questions that arrived almost at the end of the show: how difficult is it to be a leftist when you get on a regional train every day? As an honorary commuter, I would have liked to get up and say thank you. I had been happy to be at the center of a story. Not me as a single individual but me as part of a “population” that has to travel one hundred kilometers outward and one hundred kilometers back to go to work. In Red Sox all this has been raised to the nth degree. Ravenna has maintained the atmosphere of hanging out and complicity between friends, increasing the quality of the construction of each story. Hooks, postponements, returns, small sowings, everything is part of a two-hour journey along which the spectator is guided by the fast pace that Ravenna always manages to maintain.
It has not lost its spontaneity but its craft has improved and every reference – cultural, literary, musical – of Ravenna has been designed and tailored specifically for the generation born between the mid-eighties and the mid-nineties. The relationship with parents, sexual failures not allowed by Italian male culture, social interactions with the police, Harry Potter, growing old, the Neapolitan song “Sarà lui? Will it be her?” that animates every tacky Neapolitan gender reveal on TikTok, the Ultima Generazione activists, and all the little details that for two hours made me say, to myself, «it’s true, it’s like this, you’re right, I know, let’s talk about it, continue to tell everyone.” The feeling remains the same even when he beats up his brother because deep down he really is such a snob, or when he starts telling you what Matteo Salvini is for Millennials. Not even a moment of political satire but always of customs, of popular culture that Ravenna continues to bring to the stage, highlighting the regional and territorial differences.
Even when he talks a lot about himself, as in the story of that traumatic experience for him which was performing in front of 50 thousand people for the Radio Italia concert in Palermo; also in the story of the tour of the United States trying to do stand-up comedy in American English with quite a few difficulties; even when he admits his intolerance for the American tourists who infest the Airbnbs in his condominium and always leave the elevator doors open. A funny but also deeply melancholy comedy, the story of time passing. At thirty you age little by little but more quickly than in previous stages in life, you change more, you think about it more. And if Ravenna talks about how two thirty-year-old male friends can never talk while looking into each other’s eyes but always standing next to each other – as if they were fishing or hunting – he does the same with every single spectator. He doesn’t shoot anything in his face, he starts walking next to him and for two hours tells him exactly what he needs to hear.
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