Performer Lynn Ruth Miller tastes life in Singapore and Kuala Lumpur

Lynn Ruth Miller concludes her 4-blog jaunt around SouthEast Asia…

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I was in Singapore to open for Jinx Yeo, a young man who has become a hit in Asia. Wherever I go in this part of the world, the bookers know and respect him. He lived in London for a short time hoping to make a profitable career but his mother died and he returned to Singapore. Here he is a name and does corporate gigs as well as conventional stand-up performances.

The show was held at The Merry Lion. The place had been refurbished since I was there last. It used to be a very plain, no-frills place that looked more like an upstairs meeting room with a bar, but now it is painted with caricatures of comedians on the wall and a cute little lion to decorate the stage. The lighting has improved, as well.  

All this is thanks to Aidan Killian who took over direct management of the place several months ago. The Merry Lion now looks like a proper comedy club and since it does performances every night it will soon become the major club in Singapore. It is the place for both local and traveling comedians to get a good audience, proper payment and have a good, well-supported show.  

“Audience was large but anxious to laugh”

I opened for Jinx and did a 30-minute set. The audience was large but anxious to laugh and the response was wonderful. I stayed to hear Jinx because I love his comedy.  

The thing I have to remember is that comedy is artistry with words and Jinx is performing in his second language, while I  am using my native tongue. That anyone can get laughs in a foreign tongue is amazing to me, yet I know many comedians do this: Eddie Izzard, Des Bishop to name two 

I returned the next evening to do my solo show I Never Said I Was Nice and there were about 30 people there, most of them ex-pats. I did the show to ecstatic response, which was not easy because the first act was filled with novice comedians who, nice as they are as people, had not mastered the art of stand-up enough to connect with this audience.   

The exciting thing for me was that I was able to pick up a totally dead and very tired audience and make them laugh.

I got up at 6:30am the next day because Gary Tan, my wonderful friend, fellow comedian and taxi driver, wanted to be sure I caught the plane to Kuala Lumpur.

My plane was late (of course it was) and when I arrived at Kuala Lumpur airport I was met by Neal Kang, a 19-year-old Communication student whose brother Nat is a comedian and who had conned him into waiting several hours at the airport until I finally arrived. 

Neal goes to an international school. He and his family only speak English at home although he can also speak Malay. His parents are both Chinese but each one speaks a different dialect. Actually, his father is Indian but he was abandoned as a child and a Chinese couple adopted him.

“They have no sex education… No-one knows how to use a condom” (Photograph by Tim J)

Neal filled me in on the inadequate educational system in Kuala Lumpur  “They have no sex education,” he said.  “No-one knows how to use a condom.”

At 15? They are doing it? And using condoms? And this is a Muslim country ruled by Sharia Law?  

One of the required subjects is Morals (?) and, unless you pass it, you cannot get out of high school    

In ‘Morals’, they teach you the basic rules of politeness that our parents taught us in Western countries. 

The laws appear very restrictive but they do not seem to limit people’s lives. For example, you can only divorce if the man approves.  

Many couples separate and do not divorce unless the woman finds someone else and wants to marry him. In that case, they have to pay the first husband money to get him to approve the divorce.  

If the man wants to remarry, he can initiate a divorce with no problem.  

Abortion is illegal but still people do it.  

Being gay is illegal but there is a very large gay population in Kuala Lumpur.  

If you are a Muslim, you must abide by Sharia law but, if you are not, you need not worry.  

The Chinese in Malaysia are considered the wealthy faction of the population and the Indians are suspect.  

I do a joke where I say, “I say something no black person ever says: The policeman is my friend.”  When I did my set at the Crack House in Kuala Lumpur, I changed ‘black’ to ‘brown’. It got a huge laugh. 

Kuala Lumpur traffic (Photo by Timothy Tan via UnSplash)

The traffic in Kuala Lumpur is horrid but not as bad as Jakarta.

Still, it took two hours to get from the airport to my hotel and I had just enough time to unpack, grab some food and get dressed for the gig that night.  

Neal’s brother Nat picked me up along with Prakash, the MC for the evening and an amazing performer.   

That night, a huge contingent from Starbucks Coffee came to the show and drank a lot of liquid that was not coffee. The entire audience was one of the best I have ever seen and the four comedians (all men) who made up the first act were unbelievably funny. Every comedian was spot on. I thought: Thank God there is an interval because I could never follow that much laughter.

I did 45 minutes in the second half and it went down to thunderous applause.  Afterwards, all the comedians stayed to drink, dance and chat. It was lovely to see how they all form a very close supportive community.

The next day I met a magnificent, seasoned cabaret performer, Joanne Kam. It was her birthday but SHE took ME to lunch. She has been performing for over thirty years so she initiated the comedy cabaret scene in Kuala Lumpur.  

She is a single mother but has managed to create a very respected and well-paid niche for herself in her part of the world. She must have had huge and daunting blocks to overcome: a woman performing in a male-dominated culture. But she has obviously won her game. She puts on her own shows and packs houses with hundreds of patrons. She is amazing and more important a very kind, giving human being. I never felt any sense of competition with either Joanne or any of the comedians I worked with in Kuala Lumpur and the standard there is exceptionally high. 

After Joanne dropped me off at my hotel, I met Jai and Mark, (with their one-year-old Elezer), a couple I met in London two years ago. We have kept in touch and they also were with me when I did the Merry Lion in Singapore.  

I am beginning to have friends I look forward to seeing again in every country I visit and that makes these trips even more exciting and rewarding.

“I Never Said I Was Nice…“

And then it was time for the grand finale of my trip to Southeast Asia.  

I did I Never Said I Was Nice – my one hour show – as the second half of the show at the Crack House and it was a hit. Thank goodness for that.  

After the show, all the comedians went out with me for a late dinner and wonderful talk about the meaning of being human, what love is about and why we do comedy. I have to say this comes pretty close to being THE most exciting evening of my life (so far, of course.)  

Wherever we live, whatever we believe, we all share similar goals and aspirations.  

I had a friend from St Petersburg who once told me: “Everybody needs a place to live, to stay warm and eat delicious.”

I guess that says it all.  

Blow me! – My sex education

There was an item on the BBC News Channel last night in which two teenagers were explaining how the Scout movement had now introduced sex education into the curriculum to join tent erection and tying knots in ropes. For some, there might be no distinction. The newscaster asked if there would be a badge for it. The answer, sadly, was No.

Then, this morning in the bath, I turned on Radio 4 and – blow me – Woman’s Hour was talking about sex education.

What is going on?

In my day, sex education was non-existent but, from peripheral evidence, it seemed to involve stamens on flowers and the human bowel system.

I am old enough to have hit puberty before the Penguin English Dictionary was published. This was the first widely-available UK dictionary which included 4-letter words and defined clearly what other sex-related words actually meant.

As my parents were Scottish, my sex education came largely through reading the News of the World on a Sunday (and looking at the pictures).

Sex for me was a strange world of naughty vicars, women with large lines between their squeezed-tightly-together breasts and evil people of opposite sexes who were “living in sin” together, mostly in flats and bedsits. The News of the World would expose these people in long articles with pictures. They were not celebrities, just seemingly normal people who were, in secret, immoral and evil and had started to live with each other without being married but – ever vigilant – the admirable News of the World and, to a lesser extent, The People hunted them down and exposed their sinful ways in print.

My sex education also involved Carry On films at the cinema – breasts and a lot of running about and screaming seemed much involved in sex.

At home, we had a large pre-Penguin dictionary circa 1935.

This tended to confuse me.

When the News of the World and The People reported sex cases, the key words mostly seemed to be “rape” (as both a verb and a noun) and people having “carnal knowledge” of each other.

When I looked up “rape” in the dictionary, it said it was an agricultural crop grown in fields and further investigation uncovered the fact that seeds and oil were a related outcome. This “rape” was a noun and there appeared to be no verb for the word. So it seemed unlikely it was what was being described in the News of the World; but it was worth my keeping it in mind, just in case.

The alternative definition for “rape” – a verb – was to “carry off by force”. I knew this was a good definition as I had vaguely heard of The Rape of the Sabine Women, in which the Romans carried off female members of some tribe or other – well, it must have been the Sabine tribe, obviously. I was a very good researcher, so I also knew this incident had been turned into the musical Seven Brides for Seven Brothers. So that also obviously involved rape, too. But this didn’t help much. Though I did know the Italians and French made sex films with lots of large naked breasts which were shown at small cinemas in London’s West End.

This whole carrying off by force lark was presumably akin to kidnap though some of the cases reported in the News of the World did not seem to involve any carrying off to other locations. It was a puzzle.

Then there was the problem of what “carnal knowledge” actually meant. The dictionary defined “carnal” as “fleshly”, so “carnal knowledge” meant “fleshly knowledge” so, presumably, these people being exposed in the News of the World had seen other people of the opposite sex without their clothes on and that was what the big hoo-hah was all about.

It was all a great mystery to me and still is.

If anyone can help, I would be very grateful.