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Searching for “568” on the internet, one comes across the leap year in which the Longobards knocked on the doors of the Italian peninsula, in an article of the Criminal Procedure Code, decrees, serial numbers. But the protagonists of the research are the videos of Luca Ravenna, to be precise those of his show 568, a magic number whose origins sound obscure to most. We have to immerse ourselves in the “Of course… but maybe?” by the American comedian Louis Ck to find the meaning of that figure. In fact, it is the duration in seconds of one of his monologues that Ravenna has chosen as the name for his successful tour.
Graduated from the Experimental Center of Cinematography, Ravenna has collected numerous sold outs on the continent with his stand up comedy show in the last year. Already the author ofQuelli che il calcio and protagonist of the Cachemire and Taq podcasts – respectively, with Edoardo Ferrario and Daniele Tinti – the comedian also made his recording debut with 568, a comedy album recorded at the Giorgio Gaber opera house in Milan, in the center meters from where he was born and raised. The “collectible” and “old-fashioned” object that crystallizes the evening is nothing digital, but a good old vinyl. When you take it in your hand to put it on the plate you look at it with a mixture of curiosity and suspicion: it is one thing to attend a show live or, in any case, to see it from your living room at home, it is quite another to just listen to it. Moreover, without the precautions that he can have a podcast. But if at first the doubt wins, as soon as the needle begins to flow between the grooves of the vinyl he seems to be right there in the theatre. A strange feeling that captivates you from beat to beat, so much so that when you have to change sides, as it used to be, you have a moment of hesitation. For a genre like that of stand up comedy, which in Italy has taken hold through short online videos and a word of mouth fueled by social sharing, that of Ravenna, as for Saverio Raimondo and his Live a Studio 33, is a great challenge.
A challenge
A challenge that allows you to appreciate small veins behind some jokes, light nuances in the audience’s reactions – never too cumbersome and therefore an added value. For its part, Ravenna continues in its golden moment, not only for the numbers: its cynical and surgical eye dissects social relationships, the passage of time, the personal anecdotes of those who are starting to have a good number of evenings behind them. The Milanese comedian filters all of this through the lens of a boy born in 1987 who has chiseled his figure over time, making it recognizable. Even if many references are “generational”, his audience is decidedly varied, a sign that when the mechanism of the joke works sometimes you can do without the context. Great credit obviously goes to Luca Ravenna and his comedy, largely inherited from his father, a bank employee who, back home, dabbled in prank calls. And from his brother, who left the financial world to be his manager. In addition to making you laugh, 568 has the advantage of immersing you in the complicity between the comedian and the audience, in the interweaving of voices, places, atmospheres that a single person with microphone in hand on a bare stage can unravel.