Kira Soltanovich is a comedian, actress, and writer best known for her correspondent work on The Tonight Show with Jay Leno for almost 9 years. She was the Phony Photo Booth, which turned into the show’s longest-running comedy piece. (that didn’t have Jay in it). Kira teams up with Jay Leno again in the You Bet Your Life game show reboot in syndication on FOX now.
Kira has a half-hour stand-up special on Showtime called Here Comes Trouble and a one-hour stand-up special on Amazon called You Did This To Me. She’s the sidekick to host Donald Faison on the Netflix game show, Winsanity and she’s been a recurring comedian on several FOX television shows: Punchline and The Drama. Kira was a series regular on two seasons of TruTV’s How To Be A Grownup, and also shot two seasons of the Facebook series The Turndown which was shot exclusively in a bed.
Many of her fans remember her from the hidden camera show, Girls Behaving Badly, where she was a series regular for 4 seasons. Kira has been featured on Comedy Central, NBC’s Last Comic Standing, Nickelodeon, several Disney shows, and one of her most unique claim to fame moments came when Hell’s Kitchen made her the “prize” for the winning team of chefs who got a night out at The Laugh Factory on the Sunset Strip.
Kira has performed at the Just For Laughs Comedy Festival in Montreal several times and is the 2018 winner of the Big Sky Comedy Festival in Montana.
Still, one of her greatest achievements in showbiz was writing jokes for Joan Rivers on the television series How’d You Get So Rich? on TV Land.
Kira was born in the former Soviet Union, was traded for grains from the United States and immigrated in American when she was 2 years old. Kira honed her comedy chops all throughout grade school and up until high school graduation. It’s amazing how telling an angry principal a few jokes can get you out of serious trouble.
Currently, Kira is working on writing and producing her own talk show that takes place inside of a sauna. It’s called Let’s Get Sweat! and her character Kirka Parilka interviews celebrity comedians fully naked inside a blazing hot “Parilka (sauna in Russian). Kira is also gearing up to record a new one hour comedy album with the label 800 Pound Gorilla Records.
