Raybon Kan

INFO

Name	Raybon Kan (he/him)
Born	1966
Country of Birth	Aotearoa
Place of Residence	Pōneke Wellington
Ethnicities	Chinese
Artform	Literature, Comedy, Screen
Decades Active	1990s, 2000s, 2010s, 2020s

ABOUT

Raybon Kan is a comedian, critic and opinion writer who gained prominence in the 1990s for his writing in The Dominion and NZ Listener, followed by his comedy career both onstage and on-screen, where he takes a wry, observational approach to dissecting social issues.

Born in Masterton, Kan grew up in Wellington as a second-generation Chinese New Zealander. He studied for a LLB(Hons) at Victoria University of Wellington before being admitted to the bar. “I lasted six months,” he says in his Funny As interview, “and I thought: this is not really working for me.” He left law to write television reviews for The Dominion — and, later, a column for NZ Listener — a career shift “which was feasible in those days.”

Kan was writing during a period in Aotearoa when there were not yet comedy clubs or a comedy festival — but then “someone had an idea in Wellington to do a comedy night at a bar on a Sunday.” It was 1994. It was a new concept, and they got in touch with Kan to take part. “It didn’t go terribly,” he remembers. “And that was the very first time I did something where it was called ‘comedy’.” In an email exchange, he recalls:

I went up with a piece of paper and the evening didn't abide by the conventions of stand-up as such. But even though the stakes couldn't have been lower, I recall sitting in the car beforehand not wanting to do it, and wanting to drive down the motorway instead.

In 1998, both Metro and North & South named Kan Best Comedian. Kan describes his comedy style as “looking for something that’s wrong with a system and dwelling on it”, a style he honed during his time on debating teams through high school and university — including as captain of his university team, which came second in the World Universities Debating Championship in Sydney in 1988. His stand-up has been described as a mixture of “liberal intellectualism and determination to use politically incorrect subject matter”. Cartoonist Tom Scott has described his writing as gifted. “Many of his observations give shape to things you had dimly perceived yourself and you want to punch the air screaming 'Yes!!!' Other observations take your breath away with their comic invention.”

Kan has been involved in a number of screen projects as an actor and writer, and in 2009, he co-wrote and played the leading role in the film Diagnosis: Death, a horror comedy about a drug trial gone wrong, which featured Wellington comedians Bret McKenzie, Rhys Darby and Jemaine Clement.

He has toured the world extensively, has competed on Wheel of Fortune (US), and is a three-time winner of TVNZ’s IQ game show, Test the Nation.