Kae Kurd

Kae Kurd (born Korang Abdulla) is a British-Kurdish stand up comedian who has been nominated for awards by the Royal Television Society in 2017 and the Chortle Awards in 2016. He performed his show Kurd Your Enthusiasm at the Edinburgh Festival Fringe 2017.[1] He has featured as a guest on the BBC Asian Network[2] and has written for iNews[3] and TotalPolitics.[4] He is the UK's only professional standup comedian from a Kurdish background.[5]

Kurd came to Britain at 6 months old as a refugee. His parents had been part of the Kurdish resistance movement against Saddam Hussein's Iraqi government and were forced to flee as refugees.[1][6] 'At my age, my father was running at tanks', he told one interviewer. His parents first fled as a result of the al-Anfal campaign against Iraq's Kurds to Iran, where Kurd was born in 1990. Partly as a result of his father being injured in a poison gas attack in Iraq, his family were accepted as refugees and settled in Brixton, South London, where he still lives.[7]

Kurd's stage name came initially from the fact that his classmates at school could not pronounce his name. People would introduce him as “K, he's a Kurd”. After he was then announced on stage as 'Kae Kurd', decided he liked the name and adopted it as his Twitter handle. He told Festmag that, “I'm not complaining. It's nice to have some separation of your identity and stage persona.”[5]

Kurd's comedy focuses on issues of race, identity, and growing up Kurdish in the UK. He started out on the black comedy circuit in 2011 and some of his material revolves around imagining white comedians trying to pitch their routines to a black audience.[1] As someone from a nation without an independent state, “your whole existence is about trying to find an identity or to speak up for your identity”, Kurd said.[5]

Reviewing his Edinburgh comedy show, Chortle noted Kurd as 'One to watch.'[8]

In 2020 Kae was accused of joke theft after a routine he performed on the Jonathan Ross's Comedy Club television programme closely resembled that of circuit comedian Darius Davies.[9]