Hello friends!
Tomorrow I’ve got a Thailand update prepped and ready to go, but I’m gonna make it a double feature with a certain race we rarely ever chat about: the Singaporean president! This is new ground for the newsletter — Halimah Yacob’s tenure came amid zero competition and Tony Tan predates my nerdness.
Still, there’s a bigger story from the region I’ve become obsessed with and that is stand-up comedian Jocelyn Chia and her controversy. I’ve left the update about it today unlocked, but please consider signing up if you haven’t yet. As always, I offer free premium subscriptions for Asean and Timorese nationals under 30 and have been so stoked to have had so many reach out in the last month!
See you tomorrow,
Erin Cook
🇸🇬 🇲🇾 *crickets in the audience*
We often have a Singapore-Malaysia cross-update in these pages, but rarely is it as bizarre as this.
Have you heard the one about the Singapore-American comedian and the airline tragedy? It goes like this: earlier this month stand-up comedian Jocelyn Chia posted a short clip of a show she did in New York back in April. In it, she made some gags about the two countries' long-running frenemy status including some rank lines about the disappearance of MH370. “Some jokes don’t land. This joke kills in Singapore,” she said, to awkward laughs.
It triggered some of the usual naff-joke discourse like punching up vs. punching down, but also a full-on diplomatic incident. She’s no longer a citizen of Singapore and Foreign Minister Vivian Balakrishnan went into PR overdrive on Twitter, posting: “We treasure our ties with family and friends in Malaysia and are sorry for the offence and hurt caused to all Malaysians.”
To be explicitly clear, no one liked this. Comedians on both sides of the Causeway expressed unease at her cruelty and Singaporeans online and in government, like the foreign minister above, slammed the routine as needlessly provocative. It also just isn’t funny. The write-up this incident received in the New York Times (yep, it’s that big) focuses on the comedy element which is an interesting take.
What’s stunned me, and many Malaysians going by the response in the media, is the sharp escalation by the government there.
UMNO Youth did as UMNO Youth does, staging a protest outside the US Embassy in Kuala Lumpur last week. “Jokes are jokes, but they should also be based on facts. We must know the sensitivities around them, it should be done with courtesy,” organisation boss Akmal Saleh said, as per Malaysiakini. While I wouldn’t necessarily take advice on comedy from UMNO it does underscore the genuine heartache MH370 has in the country.
This week, the Royal Malaysian Police confirmed it is in the process of reaching out to Interpol for help in locating Chia, according to Malaysiakini. They want her on charges relating to the “intentional insult/provocation and incitement, while the latter concerns improper use of network facilities or network services,” the outlet reported.
I don’t know much about how Interpol operates but it appears to me more like saber-rattling at home than a genuine case. It has made me think a lot about a case we spoke about a few months back in which a Malaysian school student was investigated by police after a teacher dobbed him in for mean comments about Singapore (and the Malaysian school exams) he made in a video to TikTok.
Jocelyn Chia spoke on length with CNN here and stands by it, but notes that outside of a full routine, it does come across differently.
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