“Ah, can you give me a review? Handsome! I prefer it to the interview.
“Don’t worry, I have a publicist’s card, but I’m a “free storyteller”, so it won’t even be a real review, rather a story. With me you certainly don’t risk the classic big question that you bitterly joked about on stage: “Is it true that comedians are sad in life?”.
I greet Luca Ravenna after applauding him on the last evening of the “Red Socks” tour which brought 67,000 spectators to theaters throughout Italy between November 2023 and April 2024.
Seven months of very intense life and work, Italy toured from north to south, 62 theaters almost always sold out. In Milan 13 dates at the Teatro Lirico, always sold out.
Luca Ravenna triumphs because he is good, he makes people laugh, he uses the language that his audience expects, he talks about millennials to millennials, he lets himself be inspired by his “similars” and scans them by telling and miming their gestures, their fears, their neurosis, with a capacity for introspection and a powerful dose of refined and cultured irony.
I’ll tell you Luca, you also surprise and involve the boomers, you update them, you make them feel like co-protagonists. For example, when you imitate your parents, with mime and little voices, I think you’re brilliant!
Luca is not just any comedian: he is an actor, monologist, screenwriter, author of television programs. He was born in Milan in 1987, studied at classical high school, then moved to Rome to attend the “Centro Sperimentale di Cinematografia” and obtain his screenwriter diploma. But you can easily find his biography on the internet, I want to tell something different.
Luca is literally becoming popular among millennials born between the eighties and nineties, like him, consolidating a success deriving from his previous experiences through the winning formula which is absolutely that of Italian “Stand Up Comedy”.
A stage, three colored lights and a two-hour monologue.
This is not the classic theatrical monologue, even though it takes place in a theatre.
“Stand Up Comedy” is a first-person story, a process of exposing oneself without being a character, sometimes following a script, sometimes improvising.
Luca does this: intercepting himself with highly refined irony, he throws darts at his peers who can’t wait to catch them.
And we “grown-ups”, intruders between the stages and the audience like those parents who spy on their children’s or grandchildren’s cell phones, have a great laugh (in the true sense of the word) together with the thirty-year-olds, unmasked and accomplices of a truly good Luca.
He is good because he is intelligent and witty, certainly like all the kids who listen to him in those two hours marked by an incessant rhythm of ideas, deviations, connections, anecdotes that refer to others and then return, told in an ingenious way.
There is little about politics, but there is something, there are quotes and references to some characters like Berlusconi, there are dialects, Italic strains, categories of workers, students, religions, the father, the mother the Brother. Matteo is a special brother for Luca, I met him too. It is his inseparable alter ego that Luca inserts into some truly hilarious pieces.
Luca’s Italian character is unmistakable. In his “Stand Up Comedy” inspired by the English/American one that arrived here thanks to Youtube, Luca managed to find our language, to intercept what the Italian public needed.
On stage he is without filters, he is a friend, his attitude under the spotlight is exactly what I find while having a chat in the venue of the end of tour party, with a nice glass of bubbles in hand.
Go Luca, you’re doing great!
I’ll confess something to you: on the evening of the debut, which was also here in Milan at the Lirico, in November, I was there and I didn’t know who Luca Ravenna was. Your brother also said to me: “thank you for being here”.
As a boomer, can you forgive me? I just hope I don’t cause you that discomfort that you describe so sublimely in one of your pieces. The one from….We get it!
Hi Luca, have a good trip and come back soon!
Ps: for me Luca is a modern anthropologist.
And he is also a potential Italian Woody Allen.
Amen!
