Last night a friend here posted “We’ve had enough of Kagwe and his M-PESA Lady series. Time to move on to something else.”
At that point I didn’t know who the hell Kagwe was. Well, I knew there’s some guy who once did an M-PESA lady joke but had never thought of attaching any name to his face.
So I quickly rush to YouTube and search “Kagwe M-PESA Lady”. It’s the same guy I had in mind. George Kagwe.
First thing I notice is George isn’t a struggling comedian by any stretch of imagination.
He looks like someone who comes from a decent background. Actually by my estimates, I’d say a fairly wealthy one.
With the exception of Chebet Rono, I generally dislike entertainers from affluent backgrounds. I find their talent mostly inexistent and their content a tad bland, painfully forced and completely unrelatable. Yes, I’m talking about you Kagwe Mungai.
So I immediately tune my mind to be ready for disappointment. Tell you what, I can’t remember the last time I laughed so hard for over one hour straight. The plan was to watch just one or two videos, I ended up watching close to 30. Only my bedtime brought an end to the party.
Naturally, I left having subscribed to his channel and turned notifications on.
A few minutes ago while scrolling down my TL, I see two more friends calling George “just another cliche comedian.”
And I simply don’t understand where all this sudden bitterness towards George comes from. I refuse to buy the argument that he’s “overdoing” the M-PESA Lady skits.
For starters “M-PESA Lady” is just but an alter ego of his: this gossipping, arrogant, lazy woman with the make-up skills of a two year old, zero work ethic and the attention span of a goldfish. But not all skits are done within the setting of an M-PESA shop.
I for instance watched one where the lady was an Uber driver, another where she was a census enumerator, another a waitress, then a supermarket attendant, a nurse, a salonist etc.
His content is diverse, intelligent and thoroughly entertaining. The M-PESA Lady character is not suddenly going to morph into a sophisticated middle-class woman with an American accent.
And I realized this is the typical Kenyan jealousy. We’re always so quick to tear down one of our own with negativity whenever they get a slight breakthrough in life.
Because come to think of it, these same people have never accused Rowan Atkinson of “overdoing” his alter ego Mr.Bean. They’re in fact his biggest fans decades later.
These same people have never had a bad thing to say about Tyler Perry’s alter ego “Madea”. Madea has 11 full-length movies.
If you know American comedic viral sensation Kwaylon Rogers (BlameItOnKway), you know he was propelled to stardom thanks in no small part to his female alter ego TiTi. Today he has 4.4m followers on Instagram, hangs out with Beyonce & Cardi B and gets birthday wishes from Rihanna.
But here we’re already trying to dim the shine of someone who’s trended for less than a week!
C’mon, must do better.
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