When comedian, cabaret star and drag artist Reuben Kaye made a joke on Channel 10's The Project in February, he didn't anticipate the level of backlash he was about to cop.
It was a simple pun, in his trademark boundary-pushing style, about Jesus getting nailed to the cross, but it led to an apology from hosts Waleed Aly and Sarah Harris and 277 submissions to the Australian Communications and Media Authority (ACMA).
Even now, two months later, the Daily Mail continues to publish articles about Kaye that trigger an influx of hateful messages and death threats.
Yet it didn't take him long to mine these traumatic events for comedic gold — in his latest show, Live and Intimidating, which is playing at the Melbourne International Comedy Festival before touring to Perth and Brisbane.
In Live and Intimidating, Kaye, decked out in sumptuous costumes and his signature make-up, delivers a deranged stream of racy one-liners, punctuated by a number of show-stopping tunes that show off his incredible vocals. His subjects and his material, which changes nightly, veer from The Project fallout and his family history to drag and empowerment.
As he told RN's The Stage Show: "Comedy is about pushing back on boundaries. It's about transgression. I think drag specifically is also about that; it started off as transgression and subversion. And cabaret, the art form that I work in … is the original punk, before electric music came in, because it is social commentary and it is response and pushback."
The cumulative effect of the show, however, is more joyful than caustic.
"Even though I'm dealing with incredibly dark subjects, it's meant to be uplifting," says Kaye.
"If you can harness the sense of, let's say, panic, distrust and anger that is happening in society today, and allow the room that you're working in to feel that in a safe way, and harness it as an outward force … then the material shines brighter, it resonates deeper."
Kaye's approach is informed not only by the deep histories of cabaret and drag, but also his personal and family history, with his work tapping into a long history of Jews and other oppressed minorities turning trauma into comedy.
"This is the point about joking about uncomfortable things … it's a trauma response … Comedy is a commonality," he tells ABC Arts.
If anything, the fallout from his Project appearance has galvanised him: "I'll keep on going … I have an audience," he says.
"And we should be able to speak our minds without reproach or violence — that's a human right."
Warning: This story includes strong language and graphic content
The birth of Reuben Krum
Kaye feels the weight of his family's history.
"When you have such a momentous story to tell, and you have such a momentous amount of history behind you, you have to do it right. You have to pay service to it," he says.
His paternal grandfather was involved in Yiddish theatre in Poland, but both sides of Kaye's family were forced to flee Europe during or after WWII. Still, many of them died in the Holocaust.
After a stint as "a state-sanctioned fashion designer for East Germany", Kaye's maternal grandmother eventually ended up in Melbourne, where she became a couturier on Collins Street.
Kaye was born Reuben Krum, in 1984 — the second child of a painter and sculptor (Lazar Krum) who moved in Mirka Mora's circle, and a filmmaker (Karin Altmann).
Theirs was a home filled with music and art, and Kaye jokes: "I think of birth as my first entrance: Lighting was terrible, clean-up a bitch, but the special effects were great."
As a kid he would dress up in his grandmother's dresses from her couture days, and he devoured the work of Jewish American comedians Danny Kaye (his namesake) and the Marx Brothers.
"[What I loved about] the Marx Brothers films [was] the speed of it, the joy of it … how do you manage to be wisecracking and innocent at the same time?" he says.
His family were supportive of his sexuality — though he says his dad "had a little stumble" which he later explored in his 2021 show The Butch Is Back (which returns to Sydney in July).
High school was "terrible", however.
"I was in and out of the counsellor's office and the principal's office, being told to tone my behaviour down," he recalls.
"I was getting the shit kicked out of me, I was being thrown into traffic or having my head split open … My nose has been broken at least a couple of times. School definitely cemented that I was not just different, but a punching bag.
"At that time, even the teachers had no vocab on how to deal with a queer person. As far as I knew I was the only queer student in the school, which is impossible."
Still, he found solace in art and drama classes, and took comfort from his mum's words: "School is something you just have to survive until you get out into the real world and meet and find your people."
Finding his people
After school, Kaye studied musical theatre at the Victorian College of the Arts, where he quickly discovered musicals weren't his shtick.
"It's regimented, it's hierarchical in nature, it's repetitive … eight shows a week and matinees — matinees are a special torture," he explains.
Aged 25, he moved to London.
"School had already set in my head that I was not part of anything and not worthy. So I'd almost written off Australia … [But in London] immediately I just started to find [my] people."
While he had "dipped his toes in the cabaret pond" in Australia, it was while he was in London and Europe, during what he describes as "the crest of the burlesque revolution", in 2011 and 2012, that things really clicked.
"The cabaret scene in London wasn't like the music theatre, concert, Sondheim-on-a-stool type of cabaret that we had in Australia at that time," says Kaye.
"The host there was this amazing figure on stage who'd sing songs and talk shit. [The style was] much more amorphous, organic, spur of the moment … It seemed to be the right blend of artifice and reality, of romance and brutality. I loved that.
"[In that kind of cabaret] you're allowed to be on the edge and filthy and respond to the world — and the world … [had] been responding to me so long, [it was like] let me have a chance."
He started crafting his own act, including a few belters, and booked and filmed his gigs in London, so that he could sell himself back in Australia.
Kaye's father died in 2016, a few days after Kaye returned to the country to do his first Melbourne International Comedy Festival show.
Kaye says his parents always supported his work but didn't always "get it".
"They've always had opinions. But I think those opinions were out of fear and wanting to protect me, as they saw that what I was doing from the start was pretty iconoclastic and was pretty edgy."
The birth of Reuben Kaye
It was during a stint performing in a pantomime in Oxford in 2011 that it first occurred to Kaye to start using make-up in his cabaret act.
"I had all the make-up [with me] and I was like, 'Fuck it. I'm gonna do a face. Let's try this.' And I have a photo of it and it's vile."
It's tricky to apply make-up to one of his eyebrows, due to a scar from one of his schoolyard assaults.
"The make-up was never about a form of gender expression as much as it is about being a conduit for the material and something that makes me both an outsider and part of a community," he says.
"It helped me connect to my queerness which I felt had been in many ways beaten out of me in school and in a lot of my life in Australia.
"And then it amplified my material, it amplified the message, it amplified my politic. And then it echoed deeper within me, and became something core."
In 2019, a video for UK's Channel 4 where Kaye, dressed in drag, visits a school and meets kids, went viral.
At first, the funny and touching video drew oodles of positive comments on YouTube. Now that drag has come under attack — including a sweep of drag show bans in the US, part of a larger transphobic movement — comments are turning nasty.
Kaye says this new negative attention on drag is a distraction — but a dangerous one.
"It is about trying to find a distraction from guns, trying to find a distraction from economic vandalism or climate change … These people are using us [drag queens and transgender people] and not giving a shit about us. And our lives are on the line."
These attacks have also come as drag and queer culture has found a foothold in mainstream pop culture (see: RuPaul's Drag Race).
"A lot of money is made off drag, and sometimes that means that its edges are sanded off," says Kaye.
"[But] we have to acknowledge where it came from; it came from the gutter, it came from queer rebellion, it came from dark and dingy clubs."
'A healing laugh'
While Kaye may be performing his latest show in the comfort of Melbourne's Arts Centre, he drags the audience into the gutter with his words, and into a sublime darkness with his songs.
Those in the aisle seats, in particular, beware: You might end up enveloped in a feather boa or straddled by the artist.
But the comedian says there's nothing to fear: "I feel like I've got a really good read on how far I can push people."
Kaye is constantly toeing the line between humour and earnestness, risqueness and real risk of offense (jokes about ejaculation, gay sex and religion abound).
"[The comedy] has to be risky for the right people and safe for the right people," he explains.
"That means it has to be safe for your audience and risky for the subjects and people you're talking about. If anything, the artist has to take the risk and the audience has to feel held by them in some way."
That's why he hugs every single audience member as they enter his shows, saying to queer audience members: "Welcome home."
It's something he started before COVID and has returned to recently, as a way of disarming people's expectations of drag queens as bitchy and cruel.
"I don't want that [bitchiness] to be the hallmark of my show … [instead my show begins with] joy, warmth, that love, because then we can all walk in on an even keel, and for my queer members of my audience … they know that they're safe.
"Because then when they're safe, we can all laugh at ourselves and the world. And it's a healing laugh."
Live and Intimidating is playing at the Melbourne International Comedy Festival until April 23, Perth Comedy Festival on May 5 and Brisbane Comedy Festival from May 25-28.
The Kaye Hole, Engorged and The Butch is Back are also playing at the Melbourne, Perth, Brisbane and Sydney Comedy Festivals and the Adelaide Cabaret Festivals. Full details here.
