For affable Englishman Matt Kirshen, his upcoming appearances at the 32nd annual Kung Pao Kosher Comedy at Imperial Palace restaurant in San Francisco’s Chinatown on Dec. 24-26 represent a first.
“This is quite exciting. This is me going headlong into American Jewish Christmas,” says the comic, a Los Angeles resident and London native who has never before performed on Dec. 25. He adds, “The whole concept of Jewish people going to a Chinese restaurant on Christmas Day is American. We don’t have that in Britain.”
While he’s new to the day-of holiday performances—this year’s shows also feature Ophira Eisenberg and Becky Braunstein — Kirshen, however, has known Kung Pao Comedy host-creator Lisa Geduldig for years, and is a veteran of the Zoom Lockdown Comedy shows Geduldig put on during the pandemic.
Calling Lockdown and other online events “a bit of sanity” and “decent substitute” for doing standup in front of people’s faces, Kirshen says, “I, quote, did a gig in Finland, from my living room. It was nice being able to do comedy for people in places that I certainly couldn’t get to.”
Though he doesn’t typically dwell on Jewish themes in his act, Kirshen says he’d be a fool not to reference his Jewish background for the primarily Jewish Kung Pao crowd.
He says, “Every level of Judaism and every community around the world just has different ways of cheating. … For my family, it was eating. It was eating takeout food with pork in it, off of paper plates and newspaper covering tables. … We’re going to bend the rules. We’re going to trick God.”
Recalling his bar mitzvah, Kirshen delightedly mentions a grainy video of the event shot by his zealous camcorder-wielding uncle. Upon seeing it years later, he noticed that the magician at the celebration was Carey Marx, who went on to become his housemate. Kirshen says, “Just the idea that a North London Jewish guy who was doing table magic would be someone who I would have some connection with 10 years down the line…. it’s funny.” He adds, “On the one hand, it’s ludicrous, but I guess on the other hand, it is sort of an inevitability, right?”
Even though he consistently has been paid to write and perform comedy for some 15 or 20 years, Kirshen admits, “I even think now it’s not really for me to say I’m funny.”
When he was younger, he says, “I loved the creation of jokes far more than performing. I was never the kid who got up onstage and did a dance or anything like that.”
His first formal foray into comedy was at the University of Cambridge, writing for Clare College’s satirical newspaper, a “weekly rag we photocopied” with gossip and dumb jokes. That led to doing standup on student nights featuring first-timers and beginners. He says, “First gig was fine, second gig was amazing. Third gig I died. … But by that point I was in.”
He has vague memories of some material and performances from the early 2000s, which he calls horrible: “I’m glad there’s no tape of it. Nowadays people are videoing their first ever sets and putting them straight on social media. … But, oh, my word, I’m glad that was not the thing when I started. I can’t imagine.”
Interestingly, Kirshen has no specific mentors or heroes. He’s simply pleased he got interested in comedy when satellite TV first came to the U.K., and, instead of just four channels, there were loads of channels on which he could watch comics from all over the world. Then, when he was 18, he started going to clubs, where live comedy was cheap.
His British accent and youthful appearance are, at least in part, the reason his act is mostly clean and lacking profanity. He adds, “That’s not my personality. Doing dirty material—it’s incongruous.” Noting that friend pointed out to him, “You can’t do angry,” he says: “I have a natural friendliness that people seem to want. So why would I try and play up this thing that isn’t me?”
Kirshen had a momentous introduction to the U.S., arriving in 2007 as a participant on the NBC show “Last Comic Standing.”
“It was just the best possible way to come into Los Angeles on the back of a TV show with all the excitement that entailed. Suddenly you’re getting meetings everywhere… and everyone’s being lovely to you and you get glamoured everywhere you go. Then that TV show ends, and the dust settles and you’re left looking around.”
But, he adds, “Now it feels like home” after a move he calls a gradual process of “little increments of upgrading my visa to a green card and so on. And now I’ve got full American citizenship and an American wife. I’m pretty entrenched here now.”
Looking forward to his Kung Pao stay in San Francisco and walking around a navigable city, Kirshen laments Americans’ dependence on cars. He queries, “How it is that no one has even thought about the possibility of a pedestrian?”
Doing gigs in the Midwest and staying in roadside motels, he’s peeved that he can’t get a quick meal at, say, Wendy’s, without driving on a massive highway: “You can either walk the five miles down along the freeway, then cross the bridge and then walk five miles back, or you can get the world’s most unnecessary Uber for 90 seconds. You want to call them, and say, ‘Hey, if I just Venmo you some money, could you please throw the burger across every lane?'”
Kung Pao Kosher Comedy is at 5 and 8:30 p.m. Dec. 24-26 at Imperial Palace, 818 Washington St., San Francisco, with live streams at 6 and 8:30 p.m. Pacific Standard Time. Tickets are $35-$96 at CityBoxOffice.com/KungPao. For more information, visit www.KosherComedy.com.