No Edinburgh fringe is complete without a strident conversation about how much it costs artists to perform: who is excluded and who is bankrupting themselves to be there. But “it felt like the only people talking about that were the people who the system wasn’t benefiting,” says Olga Koch. “And the people who were benefiting, privileged comics like myself, stayed quiet because the system was working for us. And if it ain’t broke, don’t fix it.”
In an act of unabashed class treachery, then, the comedian breaks ranks at this year’s fringe with the gloriously titled Olga Koch Comes from Money – glorious because it announces the show as taboo before the 31-year-old even steps on to the stage. “It could sound like, ‘Oh my God, she’s bragging’,” says the comic. “But I don’t intend it to be morally coloured either way. I’m not saying it’s amazing I came from money; I don’t think it’s embarrassing. It’s just a fact.” But, particularly in this context, it can never be a neutral one. “Exactly.”
Koch was born and raised in Russia, and admits, in fluent, American-inflected English: “The very fact that I speak a language articulately that my parents don’t speak or understand feels like the most glaring privilege I have.” When she took up comedy, she could do “all the free work you need to do in the first couple of years, because I had security elsewhere – I knew, if it all went to shit, I could call my parents”.
But Comes from Money does not focus on the financial dimensions of a career in comedy. “That’s not a show,” says Koch, her eye (aptly) on the bottom line, “that the broader audience wants to see.” Instead, it traces her autobiography through a money lens: what wealth has meant at different times of her life, “who deserves to be rich, and does that mean other people deserve to be poor? That moral mythology created around money is very interesting to me.” As it would be to you, too, if you had come of age as the Soviet Union surrendered to the oligarchs – a process (recounted in her 2018 debut, Fight) that her father, Alfred, briefly Boris Yeltsin’s deputy PM, partly facilitated.
Koch then moved to the US, “where they have the American dream, pulling yourself up by your bootstraps and this idea that anyone can be anything”. She then moved to the UK, where, she says: “The class system is so ingrained that it contradicted everything I’d believed about money [before].”
It is a life story that promises a more nuanced take on privilege than standup’s usual stabs in that direction – broadly, Jack Whitehall braying about how posh he is. And it is important for Koch that the topic be grounded in her own experiences. “My shows are impactful only if they’re personal,” she says. The emotional cost of that was laid bare in last year’s Prawn Cocktail, a career-best offering that told the tale of a jet-setting fling gone wrong, but which also probed the downsides of airing your private life for public amusement.
Koch has since toured the show globally – to Melbourne, New Zealand and Mumbai – an experience that, much as she is grateful for it, wasn’t always comfortable. “In that show, I played recorded voice notes from the lowest, most vulnerable moments of my life. Performing it felt like showing audiences my naked body, night in and night out. And sometimes people would heckle or be drunk and the show wouldn’t connect, and you’d think: ‘I don’t want you to see me naked.’ So, it’s a lot.”
So much, indeed, that Koch sounds like her commitment to comedy is wavering. Having worked in tech before becoming a full-time comic, she is now embarking on a PhD in human-computer relations – with a view to becoming “a pop-science person who makes tech digestible”. That may or may not combine with a standup career. “Comedy demands a very specific lifestyle that was super into in my 20s,” she says. “There was valour in it. It was rock’n’roll. We’re on tour! But then if you want to have a family, or just hang out for dinner with people who aren’t in comedy …” There are some problems even calling your parents can’t easily solve.
In the meantime, Koch has this year’s hot-button show to deliver, and she says, “The paranoia is alive and well.” That is partly borne of her feeling that, on this topic, actions might speak louder than words. “It should be more about giving platforms to working-class people, rather than me, a privileged person, coming up and saying: there should be a platform for working-class people.” Fair enough – but, in this conversation (and this one alone), it is the privileged who are underrepresented. “If it’s uncouth and crass to talk about money,” says Koch, “well, the only people who benefit from that are the people who are making the most.”
Olga Koch Comes from Money is at Monkey Barrel Comedy, Edinburgh, until 25 August
