28-year-old Laura Ramoso looks straight into the camera as she cleans out her wardrobe like her German mother, including a black turtleneck and glasses pushed up the end of her nose. “How come you have so many clothes, but nothing good among them?” You get the disapproving, motherly look for free. What started as sketches on Tiktok during the pandemic has now led to two million followers, a passage in Taika Waititi’s TV series What we do in the shadows and a sketch show with which she toured three continents and which sold out in no time.
However, Ramoso thought for a long time that she would become a “serious drama actor”. “But on my second attempt at Juilliard (well-known theater school in New York, ed.) “I heard someone sigh very tiredly at the back of the room,” she said in a CBC podcast. “Then you know you have failed.”
To cheer herself up, she went in that evening The second city, Chicago’s oldest improv theater. She immediately felt a click: “When I saw those sketches, I knew that this was what I wanted to do.” Her story seemed to become one of a hard-working artist who had to conquer every millimeter of stage: she moved to the Canadian city of Toronto because there was also aThe second citytheaterand created a sketch show that won her first prize at the city’s Sketch Comedy Festival. But just as everything was finally starting to turn around, the pandemic threw a spanner in the works.
Simply recognisable
“Starting on Instagram and Tiktok was a necessity at the time,” she said on the news channel Euronews. After some experiments, her German mother’s video with her dry comments went viral. The Italian father who prepares everything down to the last detail and the American girl who has based her entire personality on her recent Europe trip soon followed. Just like the followers worldwide.
Laura Ramosa.
“I’m not a political comedian, I don’t talk about the big issues of this world,” she explains the success of her videos, which are simply recognizable because everyone encounters people as she presents them. On the train, at the market or in your living room. “My mother worked for the World Health Organization and we moved every few years. So I had to learn to build relationships with people from different cultural backgrounds and that was easier by talking about daily observations rather than politically charged topics. Like, for example, my father sleeps with his clothes on the night before he leaves for a trip because he’s afraid he’ll be late for the plane. And of course just about everything my mother did.”
Thanks to her online success, Ramoso can now focus on comedy full-time. The sketches that she turned into a show today are clearly based on the characters that made her so popular. By playing cleverly with it, and thanks to her stage talent, she delivers a show that receives much praise. “Ramoso plays with enough energy to power a small country,” wrote Time Out. “Tiktokster throws her whole body into battle for fun,” the headline read The Guardian after her appearance at The Edinburgh Fringe, the largest theater festival in the world.
I wonder if she can also make the Arenberg Theater roar with laughter tonight.
Laura Ramosa, tonight in Arenberg, Antwerp.
