- Language – Ukrainian
- Genre – stand-up, improvisation
Creative path
Iryna Gil is a Ukrainian stand-up artist, a resident of the “Underground Stand-up”. The comic has a bright charisma and a talent for writing jokes. A strong background in journalism and content management helped her start her comedic career. The author has over five years of work in lifestyle media and experience creating materials for international companies in the SaaS (ZeoAlliance, MFP) and fintech (Genome, Maxpay) sectors. Iryna has experience working with a UX writer. She also served as a content product manager at Welltech.
In 2020, Iryna Gil made her debut in humor and first appeared on the stand-up stage, discovering a new way of communicating with the audience. Two years later, in 2022, she presented her debut solo concert “The First: 11 Days Before”.
As the name suggests, the recording took place a few days before the start of the full-scale invasion. At the beginning of the video recording of the performance on YouTube, Iryna noted that some issues of the solo album had already lost their relevance. Others, on the contrary, had gained social importance. Critics called the comedian’s first concert one of the brightest debuts of the year in Ukrainian stand-up. The performance became a kind of dash under the comedian’s first year of stage activity.
Creative Style
The themes of Iryna Gil's jokes are familiar to every viewer:
- childhood memories;
- everyday observations;
- male and female beauty;
- predictions in "Silpo";
- relationships;
- funny stories about one's own surname and documents, and much more.
What especially captivates humor fans is the special style of presentation of the material. After all, Iryna tells quite funny things with restraint and calmness on her face. And this only adds a special flavor to the artist's live broadcasts.
Social activism and civic position
Since the beginning of the full-scale invasion, Iryna Gil has actively interacted with Western media, leaving comments under the materials of publications. There, the Ukrainian explained the context of the military events and called for supporting the information front and counteracting Russian propaganda.
In 2023, Iryna became one of the first Ukrainian stand-up comics to be included in the lineup of several events of the world's largest performance festival Fringe, which has been held annually in Edinburgh since 1947. The star of the comedy industry admits that for comedians this is a kind of peak. Live at the festival can be compared to a concert at the Palace "Ukraine" or a performance on Netflix. For the Ukrainian stand-up comedian, participation in the festival was not only a professional achievement, but also an opportunity to tell the world about Russia's war against Ukraine.
The comic strip emphasizes that humor is a way to convey a complex truth in an accessible form. Iryna explains to foreigners that war is not a plot on TV, but the everyday reality of Ukrainians. And that “Russian culture” means the destruction of hospitals and looting. And to make it easier for a foreign audience to perceive serious topics, Iryna skillfully weaves them into light jokes about the weather or accents.
