Books | Comedian Kaisa Pylkkänen found out what a man’s worst fear is

“Hey, I’m Kaisa. I’m a feminist – or as men say: single,” the stand-up comedian introduces himself and immediately makes a few viewers burst into laughter.

On a Wednesday evening in January, the streets of Helsinki are empty, but rocky On The Rocks – in the back room of the restaurant, every chair is reserved. Open mic – having come to the small stage of the evening Kaisa Pylkkänen no need to warm up the audience for a long time. The cheering that started from the first line continues throughout the five-minute set, and on a couple of occasions the space is filled with laughter.

Pylkkänen is one of the club’s four drivers. Today, he also works as an MC, or master of ceremonies, who introduces each comedian and keeps the atmosphere going.

Pylkkänen is one of Finland’s best-known stand-up comedians and All Female Panel – of the founding members of the collective, even though he no longer belongs to it. He has also been involved in writing many Finnish television series, such as Newsroom, Authoritarians and YleLeaks.

At the beginning of this year, he made another territorial conquest and published his first novel Danger of explosion (Oak).

“It took 24 years before I got something under my own name,” Pylkkänen says and pours coffee into a mug that reads ‘Kirjailija Pylkkäne’. He also received a mug as a gift from his fellow comedians at his book launch event From Krisse Salmi and From Heli Sutela.

One or two a year ago, Pylkkänen wondered why there were no women in their fifties in movies and television series. After all, women have always been prevented from advancing in their careers by appealing to hormones that mess with their heads, but if that were the case, I’d think writing female characters would be really delicious.

“When you read the list of menopause symptoms, it turns women into drama machines,” says Pylkkänen.

He says that he first planned a film about middle age. However, with the corona pandemic, the genre changed to prose.

Then he gets serious. Although Danger of explosion the sport is light, its subjects are serious. Pylkkänen wanted to describe how women, women’s health and women’s ailments have always been downplayed in our society.

“A woman as a patient always makes up her own ideas and is hysterical. That’s why many women throughout history have been left very alone with their illnesses,” says Pylkkänen.

Danger of explosion– the novel is about Miina Malvisto, a TV personality in her forties, whose health has started to deteriorate. When Malvisto messes up on a live talk show and gets fired, a fall begins, with no shortage of twists and turns. Because giving up publicity and success is so difficult, the former TV star gets more and more entangled in the web of lies and deceptions.

Pylkkänen admits that there is something in his main character the same as in himself.

“I am single and childless, like Miina Malvisto. And I have been blessed with that temperament myself, which has been a weird combination with hormones, rage has also become familiar at times. But I hope I’m not as egomaniac as he is,” Pylkkänen says and laughs.

He set his novel in the television world because he knows it so well. He has seen from the side what publicity can do to people.

According to him, working life also discriminates against aging people. It can be seen in the way that older workers are played off in order to replace them with younger, easier and cheaper ones.

Pylkkänen believes that the work of the screenwriter and stand-up comedian has been very useful in writing his debut novel. While making long TV series, he has learned to manage large story entities, build scenes and sprinkle in cliffhangers.

The biggest difference in writing the book was that, for the first time in his career, he could decide everything on his own.

“On television, the end result is always slightly different from what the screenwriter has written. There are so many people and variables in between that can change the tone, or screw up the whole thing, that it’s a pure miracle if anything comes out at all,” says Pylkkänen.

A good – or terrible – example of this is a television series A nest of hands, which Pylkkänen wrote almost 20 years ago. It was clear to him from the beginning that it was a dramedy-comedy, but one of the directors disagreed with the genre.

“The end result was painful to watch. Everything that I had written to be very comedic was directed to be very serious.”

He is saddened by the invisibility of screenwriters’ work. There may be no mention of the screenwriter in reviews and magazine articles. The author’s work is also often credited to someone else.

“If the end result is bad, it’s the screenwriter’s fault. If it’s good, then the director has managed to handle the themes wonderfully,” says Pylkkänen. Right after, he emphasizes that he will not under any circumstances belittle the director’s work.

Pylkkänen has noticed that even within the industry, many understand writing a screenplay as writing dialogue, even though it is much more.

“Dialogue is maybe five percent of the script. That’s where the whole world is created and all the people in it, who have to be whole and logical in themselves.”

In particular, he is annoyed by the industry’s unreasonable processes. The production company, or in the worst case, the scriptwriter, does half the work at his own risk, before he can even negotiate with a potential buyer.

“Usually what happens after this is that the channel sits on the script for two to six years. And after that they say that we want this, but already in the fall – and the author has a week to do a year’s work.”

But a long career can accommodate many successes. Pylkkänen’s “Dearest Baby” is a drama series Newsroom, which followed the radical young journalists of Yleisradio’s news department during the Cold War. The channel gave time to plan the series, and the scriptwriter spent long periods of time in the National Library researching the era and interviewed many contemporaries.

Originally, Pylkkänen was supposed to write the series alone, but in the end they wanted another writer to join, because “now, no woman can write something like this alone”, she acknowledges.

Newsroom was also important to Pylkkänen personally, because before that he had suffered from burnout and was on the verge of giving up and leaving the entire industry.

“I had given my all the whole time, and the amount of work was simply too much for one person to handle. When I asked for help, I was told that next season. I wasn’t able to work for months, it’s a miracle that I’m alive, let alone working anymore.”

It’s no wonderthat the relaxation of stand up was attractive after rigid TV productions.

Pylkkänen had already fallen in love with the sport while studying in London in the late 1990s. A penniless student couldn’t afford to go to the theaters, but he could go to stand-up nights with a few pounds.

“Stand up is the punk of performance art. There are no rules, anything can happen.”

However, it took 12 years before he dared to go on stage himself. Encouragement was increased by the course which Pirjo Heikkilä organized for funny women because he needed more of them in a male-dominated field.

Stand up comedian there is no need to come up with jokes on his own, because the world around him constantly offers them to him.

When the little boys sniffed him at the bus stop, he told them he was recording everything because he is a comedian and collects material for his shows. That made the boys panic. Pylkkänen also used this in the conclusion of his story.

“I made an observation that apparently already at the age of 10, a man’s worst fear is to be laughed at. Women fear that they will be raped or murdered. And men, that they are laughed at or their finger goes through the toilet paper.”

In a couple of his stories, he describes penis experts who come to criticize female drivers in a parking garage or offer their help to a working comedian in a bar, because men’s self-esteem can do it.

“Whatever it is that I do for work, they know how to do it better than I can handle it,” jokes Pylkkänen.

“The writer’s joy is that adversity is always a good match. I try to turn everything that is messed up in life into a story. Even if it feels bad now and I don’t laugh, I have to be able to look at it from some angle later.”

Strong female model Pylkkänen got his family from women. Already Pylkkänen’s great-aunts studied academic professions at the beginning of the last century and lived childless and independent. Grandpa brought a touch of artistic jute to inherit Oiva Paloheimowho “was able to write and live an artist’s life in the yard of the rectory in Vesilahti, because grandma printed three dunes.”

The comedian’s mother belonged to a clergy family and studied to be a theologian. Father, on the other hand, was a psychiatrist by profession. Pylkkäne also has a story about his Freudian-Christian background in his set. In it, he describes the relationship of parents’ completely opposite tendencies to, for example, sex.

“When you combine the two as an educational method, it’s a bit like reading a children’s book, but Jorma Uotinen with a voice.”

Work-oriented Pylkkänen, who lives life, says that he is happy when he gets to write, that is, to do exactly what he has always dreamed of.

However, Pylkäne has one passion that is not related to work.

“I love Eurovision and I’m in a great mood From the wrapper. I’ve been jamming that song from morning to night every day. What a confusing and cool story it is about a man whose hard outer shell reveals a soft person towards the end. The wrapper can wrap the visas for Tampere for us.”

For spring, he is planning a combined work and visa trip to the British. From the Eurovision Song Contest in Liverpool, it would be convenient to continue to Brighton, where Pylkkänen performs at comedy festivals.

“I love the atmosphere of Eurovision. It’s a race where everyone’s on everyone’s side and it’s completely devoid of the taste of blood in your mouth enemy setup. We’re only there for happiness and love.”

A bit like a stand-up club at its best.

Kaisa Pylkkänen: Räähdysvaara (Tammi) has just been published.

Kaisa Pylkkänen’s solo gig at Myyrmäki Lobby 1.2.