This is an IHeart podcast.

Welcome to Aaron Menke's Cabinet of Curiosity's, A production of IHeart Radio and grim and mild.

Our world is full of the unexplainable.

And if history is an open book, all of these amazing tales are right there on display, just waiting for us to explore.

Welcome to the Cabinet of Curiosity's.

They say that art imitates life, but sometimes in the strangest ways, life life imitates art.

What begins is fiction, created to comment on the world, can end up shaping it.

And in a twist, no screenwriter could script, the line between performance

and real life disappears.

In 2015, a new show hit the airwaves in Eastern Europe and instantly became a hit.

Called Servant of the People, the comedy followed a character named Vassal Holoborodko,

an affable yet absent-minded high school history

teacher who lives with his parents in the big city. After a particularly frustrating day,

Vassel makes a profanity-laced rant against government corruption to a friend, which one of his

students secretly gets on camera. The video goes viral and suddenly this character, Vassel,

find himself at the center of a grassroots campaign for the presidency. Ordinary people rally

around him and he wins. Although Vassal at first feels like a fish out of water, dealing with

the expectations of bureaucrats and the closed-door deals of oligarchs, he quickly finds his voice.

The comedy series follows him as he tries to weed out corruption in the government,

often to comedic effect. The show was funny, sharp, and surprisingly heartfelt. While more than a little

cynical, the show was a hopeful comedy about a normal person making real change, and the

heart of it all was its star, a comedian.

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