Oliver "Olli" Gimber's story is as crazy as it is funny. Germany's funniest master painter has been thrilling thousands of spectators at his live performances throughout the German-speaking world since 2016. Yet it all started quite harmlessly: Olli's buddy Wolfi, who has been living in New Zealand for years, asked him over 5 years ago to send a joke via the app WhatsApp for lack of good New Zealand joke tellers.
A group was initially formed consisting of Olli's childhood friends whom the master painter supplied with "fresh" jokes on a weekly basis from then on. "But I was also a little naive," admits Olli today, because the possibility that the jokes could also be shared outside the group, he did not think at the time.
With the "Black Radish" a controversial joke that also cost Olli important customers and orders, a bomb finally burst. Olli's jokes spread like wildfire, the press took notice, the entrepreneur became an online phenomenon. The hype was first felt on Facebook, with friend requests breaking the 5000 mark - the Facebook limit - in a rush, and click numbers soaring into the millions.
Before Olli knew it, he was on stage for his first live performance in front of an audience of over 700 on April 29, 2016 - a sell-out crowd. "It was supposed to be a rehearsal gig at first to see if people would even want to see me," Gimber says, adding, "The whole thing feels like a dream. Who would have thought anyone would want to see a 55-year-old master painter sitting in a car telling jokes and almost peeing his pants laughing." But his success proves him right. Today, more than 250,000 fans on Facebook and Youtube regularly see his jokes, and in total there are already well over 100 million, because Olli is no longer an unknown face on television either. He has already been a guest twice on SAT1's Frühstücksfernsehen and sat next to showmaster Hugo Egon Balder in the comedy show "Richtig Witzig". In a very short time, Olli became a media professional, but he doesn't want to be seen as a "normal comedian": "I'm a master painter, that's my daily business. The comedy business is just a side job that I do as long as I enjoy it. But I'm not addicted to it and I'm happy about that."
Text source and more information about this event at: https://www.jahrhunderthalle.de/programm/kalender/witz-vom-olli/25-01-2020-20-00/
