Raybon Kan
| Raybon Kan | |
|---|---|
| Born | Masterton, New Zealand |
| Medium | Stand-up, television |
| Nationality |  New Zealand |
| Years active | ???-present |
Raybon Kan is a Masterton, New Zealand-born Han Chinese comedian and newspaper columnist.
Early life and family
Kan's family moved to Wellington, New Zealand soon after his birth, where he began his education at St Mark's Church School (where he was Dux and showed an early flair for public performance) and continued through to Wellington College where he was School Council President and proxime accessit to dux. He attended Victoria University of Wellington's law school, for what he called 'inexplicable reasons', and earned his LL B(Hons) and admission to the Bar. During his university days, he captained the Victoria team to second place in the World Universities Debating Championships, losing the final to the University of Oxford. At Victoria he won the Dominion Journalism Scholarship and the Energy Law Research Scholarship, and an article of his on energy law was published in the New Zealand Law Journal.
Career
He first came to prominence writing television reviews for The Dominion newspaper in Wellington and was soon performing stand-up comedy on stage and on television. His television work included regular appearances on sketch shows, though it has been reported that live comedy is his passion.
Raybon has been named Best Comedian by Metro and North and South magazines on repeated occasions in New Zealand. He has performed at the Melbourne Comedy Festival, (where The Age newspaper named him one of the festival's highlights,) the Montreal Comedy Festival (1998 and 2001) and the Edinburgh Fringe. He has also performed in Calgary, Toronto, Vancouver, Hong Kong, San Francisco, Los Angeles and Sydney. He was nominated for the inaugural Billy T Award in 1997.
His movie reviews featured in TV3's Nightline nightly news programme. His New Zealand TV appearances include "Pulp Comedy", "Laugh Festival Gala," "Before Stardom", "Look Who's Famous Now", Skitz, "Test the Nation" (which he won three times), "The Great New Zealand Spelling Bee", Inside New Zealand, a documentary in which he trained for two months to be a casino croupier; and a profile in TV's 60 Minutes. In Australia he has performed on "Hey Hey It's Saturday" and been interviewed by Bert Newton.
He authored Five Days in Las Vegas in the early 1990s, about his travels to the United States during which he appeared on Wheel of Fortune. Another travel-based title, America on Five Bullets a Day, in which he indulged his passion for tennis, was published in 1998. The latest compendium of his work, An Asian at My Table, was published by Penguin in 2004. For many years he wrote a column in The Sunday Star Times.
He has three film roles in "I'll Make You Happy" (directed by Athina Tsoulis), Tongan Ninja (directed by Jason Stutter) and Spooked (directed by Geoff Murphy).
In November 2004, he became the TV commercial spokesman for the Freedom Air airline in New Zealand. Coincidentally in the 1990s he also fronted an ad campaign for a finance company named Freedom.
He has recently relocated to London. In August 2009 he performed his stand-up show 'Spermbank Millionaire' at the Edinburgh Fringe. In August 2009 his latest film Diagnosis: Death (directed by Jason Stutter) was released in the UK.
External links
- Raybon Kan - official site
- Raybon Kan at the Internet Movie Database
- http://www.diagnosisdeath.co.uk
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