Spotlight on Ryan Radusinovic, Founder of Balkan Comedy Night
In the Photos: Ryan Radusinovic
Photo Credit: Kayla Adanalian
Review by Tanja M. Laden
35 years ago, in the midst of the breakup of Yugoslavia, it would have been practically impossible to imagine a North American comedy club jam-packed with people tied to different Balkan countries celebrating their cultural differences and similarities through laughter. And we’re not talking about a chuckle here or there; we’re talking the kind of gut-busting hilarity that brings tears to your eyes, makes your cheeks hurt, and has you scoping out the club for the nearest bathroom so you don’t pee your pants. That’s exactly how funny, and cathartic, Balkan Comedy Night is.
Established in 2023, this nationally touring comedy showcase is the brainchild of 40-year-old Ryan Radusinovic, whose own Serbo-Montenegrin heritage inspired him to assemble a group of talented comics in major cities across the U.S. and Canada in order to bring audiences together and joke about all things Balkan. Nothing’s off-limits. Dysfunctional family dynamics, hypocrisy, confused identities, colorful curses—it’s all fodder for the brave stage comics who try to get the ultimate response from the crowd: a unified, uproarious, and delighted round of giggles, guffaws, and applause, followed by the inner satisfaction of knowing that a specific joke landed just right.
For Radusinovic, however, the road to Balkan Comedy Night has been a bit circuitous. In fact, he never really set out to work in comedy at all. He earned his degree in Radio-TV-Film from California State University, Fullerton, hoping to become a screenwriter. But while still in college, he started doing stand-up and realized seeing people’s immediate reactions mattered more to him than writing screenplays that wouldn’t be produced until years later, if ever.
Like many people from the Balkans, Radusinovic’s story is complex. He was born in Anaheim, California, a first-generation American on his Montenegrin-born father’s side and a third-generation on his Montenegrin-American mother’s side. His parents divorced when he was a kid, and he spent time with his mom and stepfather in rural Alaska, Louisiana, and Washington state before moving to Downey, California, to live with his maternal grandparents and quickly reconnecting with his biological dad, thus bringing him back closer to his heritage. Around this time, Radusinovic remembers his own experiences growing up with his uncles who would do impressions of their flamboyant relatives and recount wild stories of being Serbian in 1970s Southern California. “They would just have me dying laughing,” he recalls.
Radusinovic got his comedy start at Flappers Comedy Club in Burbank. Yet while he came up in the wider American comedy milieu, he found himself drifting into the extremely successful and increasingly robust Latin American comedy scene as an opener for the late Jeff Garcia. And that’s kind of where the idea for Balkan Comedy Night came about. Radusinovic wanted to bring larger awareness to Balkan culture by shining a spotlight on its mentality and showing its people in a positive way. “Instead of always being villains,” he quips. “In Hollywood movies, if they’re Eastern European, they’re the bad guy.”
However, it wasn’t exactly easy in the beginning. In the debut edition of Balkan Comedy Night at the California Room at the Ice House in Pasadena, in the face of a phalanx of Croatians wearing checkered shirts from one comic’s local church, Radusinovic “half bombed” his set. A couple of months later, however, he tried again, and as he describes it, “We just hit the ground running.” From there, it became a monthly event in different towns, with Balkan Comedy Night drawing on local talent in each city. The comics themselves are wide-ranging, including recurring performers Vic Gjonaj and Stanko Zovak, as well as those from across the Balkan diaspora. They represent countries ranging from Albania and Romania to Bulgaria and Bosnia and everywhere in between. Sometimes the jokes are personal, sometimes they’re universal, but either way, they’re always relatable to a crowd hungering for community, laughter, and most of all, recognition of a rich, colorful heritage.
Today, Radusinovic is deftly balancing a complex history with a passion for comedy, lots of travel, his own recent baptism in the Serbian Orthodox Church, and a job as a creative director for a TV startup. Plus, a big part of a comic’s success is often due to the loyalty, devotion, encouragement, and unwavering support of a loved one, which Radusinovic is lucky enough to have in a long-term relationship. And if comedy doesn’t work out? He’s thinking he’ll get his paramedic’s license. For now, however, Radusinovic is joining Macedonian-Australian headliner My Cousin Vlad as a featured comic on Vlad’s eight-city tour of Southeastern Europe this September. Meanwhile, after selling out shows in 15 cities across the U.S. and Canada, Balkan Comedy Night will be waiting for him when he gets back.
“I could not imagine not having stand-up. I don’t know what the heck I’d do with my life,” says Radusinovic. “I’ll just keep doing it. And I have no idea where it’s going to lead me, but it’s leading me to some good places.”
Tanja M. Laden is a Southern California-born, internationally educated writer, editor, researcher, and producer with experience in creating travel and lifestyle content for digital and print media. She is the founder and publisher of Trippybroad, a one-woman literary magazine grown out of Los Angeles, consisting of current adventures, orphaned travel stories, rescued articles, poetry/fiction fragments, and more.
Tanja has scattered her byline across places like Vice, Playboy, Food & Wine, Los Angeles
Times, Juxtapoz, TravelAge West, Backstage, LA Weekly, KCET, and many more. Somewhere
between writing about her visits to countless countries and digging through the archives of High Times, she wrote a commemorative book called Assistance League of Los Angeles: The First 100 Years. She’s also created sponsored content for brands such as Samsung, Microsoft, Sony, Disney, Syfy, Espolòn Tequila, and Beck’s Brewery, among many others.
She holds a Bachelor of Arts in History from Occidental College. In her free time, she volunteers with the Motion Picture & Television Fund (MPTF) and is the Vice President Emeritus of the Cameron Parsons Foundation, Inc. She enjoys nature, animals, classic jazz, and vintage stores, and has a small but mighty antique postcard collection.
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