Stand-up, performance
In English
16+

Stand-up comedy is hardly a genre renowned for its political correctness. Nevertheless (or perhaps precisely for this reason), Kristóf Horváth uses this form to weave his experience of his dual identity into a story. Evoking his mother who ever wanted to break free from her origins, sets off a chain of memories, many of them tinged with shame. Through a series of emotional, humorous and poignant situations, Horváth shows that shame is as much an affect rooted in deeply personal experience as a socially embedded, habitual construct.
Why, after all, would a mother tell her beautiful-voiced son that if he goes down to the mine to sing, the coal will come up? Is it even possible to joke about blackness? And about whiteness? And do Nazi jokes work in the same way as Gypsy jokes? These are the questions at the heart of Talking Human, created by Kristóf Horváth, aka Actor Bob: actor, writer, slam poet and founder of Knowledge Is Power, a group working with disadvantaged young people. The performance was created for Stand Up Roma 2025, a competition launched by Independent Theatre Hungary and Trafó with the aim of providing a platform for stories told from Roma perspectives to strengthen the self-representation of Roma performing artists. (Beatrix Kricsfalusi, curator)

Talking Human is both entertaining and deeply confrontational: through humor and irony, it highlights familiar situations that expose the uncertainty and fears underlying social prejudice. It functions as a kind of “Gypsy for Dummies” class, where the Roma perspective is not an end in itself, but a tool for a shared journey of self-reflection.
“More than once I’ve struggled with the dilemma of how Gypsy I actually am as a half-Gypsy, whether I really have enough connection to all this… These are my memories, my own lived experiences, but I think that if there is one thing that truly applies to all Roma people, it’s that we all know what it’s like to live as someone excluded…” – Kristóf HORVÁTH

Kristóf HORVÁTH, known to many simply as “Actor Bob,” examines the social and personal workings of shame in his stand-up performance, structured around memory and the processing of memory. He raises the question of how much individual memories belong to the self, and how much they belong to the collective memory of the Roma community.
In his Berlin performance Talking Human, which can be seen as a precursor to this piece, Kristóf explored the relationship to his Roma identity that he learned from his mother; in the present performance, he expands this further through the tools of stand-up comedy.

CREDITS

Concept, performer: Kristóf HORVÁTH
Set design: Norbert OLÁH

Bio

Kristóf HORVÁTH is a writer and actor. He was a member of the Bárka Theatre and Maladype Theatre, a two-time national Slam Poetry champion, and the founder of the 'Tudás Hatalom' (Knowledge Is Power) group. He regularly conducts unconventional literature classes in rural schools, and within the international Expect Art program he creates forum-theatre productions with students (based on compulsory school curricula) using a critical-pedagogy approach. He is the writer of Gypsy-Hungarian, nominated for the Péter Halász Award, and a lead actor in the 2022 film Three Thousand Numbered Pieces, inspired by that production.