filipino comedian

Kevin Camia’s Kindness

Kindness

I mentioned Kevin Camia before in a previous post and luckily I was able to listen to his latest album called Kindness. I like Kevin’s style because he’s just funny without resorting to the typical Filipino accent punch line that a lot of Filipino American comics substitute for good writing. Frankly, I’ve heard one too many of those routines where the comedian shows how hilarious his parents sound because they have a fobbish Pilipino accent that switches the p’s and f’s and v’s and b’s. Come on, enough already! I get it, Pinoys talk funny. Here’s a litmus test: take away the accent and the act just isn’t funny. And what’s sad is unsophisticated audiences who are just hungry for Pinoy comedy just eat this up without realizing it’s a hack.

Not Kevin’s act. You can tell Kevin is a good writer and has done a lot of gigs beyond those Filipino fiestas where they ask performers to do it for free. He makes use of a lot of misdirections and just when you thought you knew where he was going, he changes it up with some absurd sh*t. It’s like a misdirection within a misdirection. That’s what cracks me up. Things like:

I was raised up in Sta. Rosa… all I did was hang out with white kids coz that’s all there was. I would end up doing crazy white shit… like hang out in creeks… we played these staring contests, we’d stare at each other and you couldn’t blink your eyes at all then we’d take these ferns from a tree and pull our pants down… and just tickles our balls – crazy white shit. Remember that game, bro?

What I like is the fact that Kev is funny first before anything else. It’s what I always believed in as a Filipino comedian myself. I would rather just be a funny guy who happens to be Filipino. So throughout the cd, you don’t have to be a Filipino to get his humor. Kindness is universal, and so is Kevin’s comedy.