The Sidelines: Political satire
With Jo Kukathas, writer, actor and director at The Instant Cafe Theatre Company
The Sidelines is the supplementary issue to every main edition of The Starting Block. Here you will find the interview transcript and more information about the conversation of the week. The interview is transcribed by Otter.ai and edited for length and clarity. All links provided come from me and not the guest unless stated.
Listen to the audio version here.
CORRECTION NOTICE: In a post-interview correspondence, Jo Kukathas reached out to clarify that when she said Rehman Rashid at 22:22 into the recording, she was actually referring to his brother, Rafique Rashid, who did stand up and political songs. This correction is reflected in the transcript below but not in the audio.
TRANSCRIPT
TINA CARMILLIA: Hello, my name is Tina Carmillia, and this is The Starting Block, a weekly conversation on science and society with an emphasis on disinformation, data and democracy.
Before we start, I’d like to let you know that the transcript and credits for this conversation are available on The Sidelines, the supplement to every main edition of The Starting Block.
Now, in the next lane: Jo Kukathas, writer, actor and director at The Instant Cafe Theatre Company. Our topic this week: political satire. Ready? Let’s go.
JO KUKATHAS: OK.
TINA CARMILLIA: You can start by introducing yourself and especially your work in political satire. Let’s start with that.
JO KUKATHAS: So I formed my theatre company along with three other friends in 1989, and that theatre company started off as a company, which wanted to do political satire. This was in 1989, partly because in 1987, of course, there was Operation Lalang. I’ve been doing a lot of other kinds of theatre, you know, a bit of Shakespeare, a bit of Shaw, literally, and I began to feel everything other people, my friends also began to feel well, what can you say what’s happening right now. But none of us were playwrights, so we think, well, we kind of sit down and write a play.
So, some of us have become very close friends in a production of Romeo and Juliet. And during that production, we talked about the possibility of us forming our own theatre company. Subsequently, somebody actually just offered us a space upstairs in their restaurant and said, “Would you like to use it?” So then that kind of was what prompted us to then get our act together and form the theatre company. And it was very clear to us that what we wanted to do was to do this kind of comedy.
TINA CARMILLIA: Well, I would think that a typical Malaysian would duck and cover after witnessing something like Operation Lalang.
JO KUKATHAS: Well, it was a year and a half later, so it wasn’t so immediate. I mean, I think the immediate thing was upset. I don’t think even when it first happened, I wanted that I or any of my close friends wanted a duck and cover, I think, but rather I think a lot of us were very upset. And my father was himself.
My father was a journalist who used to be in the diplomatic service. So I grew up in quite a political family in that way. When I came back from university, the first thing I did was to help him with a book he wrote called The Musa Dilemma. I mean, I helped, meaning I proofread it. I didn’t do anything else for a book called The Musa Dilemma, which was a book about Musa Hitam, basically saying why he was going to choose to leave the Cabinet of Dr Mahathir Mohamad. It talked about the kind of anti-democratic practices he felt were in place already. So I was never a Dr Mahathir fan, and as much as he now has claimed that Operation Lalang was nothing to do with him, but you know the police was making some decisions, he was very much part of that whole authoritarian attitude he had towards dissent.
So, I don’t think that is in [my] DNA to shy away. People were quite happy to come along with that and, of course, wishing their work was as political. But they definitely grew political because that’s also what audiences really responded to when we first started trying it out.
TINA CARMILLIA: Let’s talk about the audience. Let’s talk about how much has changed since you started. This was like three decades ago when you started, right? And I was saying that I would think that people would shy away from it. I’m curious about how the audience has changed in terms of the reception, in terms of the willingness to participate.
JO KUKATHAS: That’s a really interesting question, and I don’t think the answer is so simple because I don’t think it’s been a linear journey by any means. I think, like when we first started doing the political comedy, the political satire, a lot of people were, you know, the naysayers, they all said, “Oh you won’t last a week.” And then it was, “Well, you won’t last a month.”
Thirty-two years later, right? And it’s because of the nature of comedy, you know, comedy allows people to laugh, despite themselves, despite fears, which is, I think, why we gravitated towards comedy because it was a very fearful time, 1988, 1989, there was a kind of tension, lots of tension, in fact. So I think when people came, and they could break the tension with laughter.
It’s kind of a case of the emperor’s new clothes, like, here are these people making fun of the emperor. And it was safe for the audience because they were not doing it because other people were doing it. So the audience also were very protected, and we were complicit with the audience, and they will come and sit with that. We’ve always been very fond of our audience. They come to watch us, and they say, “Thank you,” then we say, “Well, thank you, because, actually, you’re allowing us to also, in a way, get away with it.”
And, we did have some run-ins with the authorities in the early days, but at that point, the government was so sure of itself, so strong, that they just saw us as being, well, it’s okay, you can do that, because they were unassailable. And in fact, we had a very weird relationship with the authorities, with the government, because they started to hire us. In fact, we used to kind of joke about it. And it will be individual people like Ling Liong Sik, for example, if he was invited to a company dinner, he would say, “Could you get Instant Cafe? Then I might consider coming.” And we used to say jokingly to him, “We should give you a commission because we got this particular gig, right?”
So, it went from people in a bigger restaurant in a small room upstairs to people who were now being invited to perform at a government function with a thousand people. And it’s a really odd sensation, and sometimes I felt I shouldn’t be doing this, but a friend of mine pointed out, he said, “If you only do it in that other space, you’re preaching to the converted.” But when you go and perform in these other kinds of functions, you have a lot of people coming up to you later and say, “Oh, I didn’t know you could say things like this,” or, “That was really funny I didn’t know you could say that.” And, of course, sometimes you can have people coming up to you and say, “How dare you say that. You shouldn’t be criticising our glorious leaders.”
So, I don’t think it’s about whether or not people have gotten more open or less open. I think there are pockets of people who have always been open, and there are pockets of people who are always fearful.
I definitely remember doing this one show at the PJ Hilton, and at that point, the government was doing this campaign called Kwality, spelt with K-W. I remember just going there in the middle of the afternoon and doing the show for all these civil servants who were completely bemused but who just loved the show. And they would say, “Eh, baguslah. Suka. Senang. I really, really liked it.” And I remember going and doing a show in Penang. Again, this must mean that it was in the mid-90s. I think it’s our first show in Penang. And one of the maintenance guys came up to me when we were doing our soundcheck — this elderly Malay gentleman — he said to me, “Very good, very good,” he said, “I’m very happy Instant Cafe has come to Penang, I love Instant Cafe.” So I said, “Eh, pak cik, where did you see Instant Cafe?” He said, “I’d never seen.” I said, “Then why do you say you love Instant Cafe?” He said, “Oh, I read about it. My friend told me about it in KL.”
He loved the fact that somebody’s out there doing this kind of thing. That really kind of blew me away, and over the years, people have come up to me and said to me, “Actually, we decided to do ‘X’ because we saw what you guys were doing,” or, “We felt like we could say this because what we saw you were doing,” and I think that’s been very gratifying.
I think jokes are a free-for-all. Jokes are like a brawl. I think satire is like a courthouse drama. It has rules. It has etiquette. It has finesse. And, of course, once in a while, you lay a sucker punch to win your case and you use humour, all the time, of course, but your goal isn’t just to get people to laugh.
TINA CARMILLIA: Yeah, I would imagine. But let’s take a couple of steps back and look at the definition of parody, satire, and comedy. And if we observe on social media, for instance, we also see how people try to hide behind these definitions, or use them to justify insults. “Oh, just a joke,” you know, “Have a sense of humour.”
JO KUKATHAS: Well, I think the word ‘joke’ is the catch-all for a lot of things. But I think the satirist isn’t really interested in jokes, as such. The humour is a kind of means to an end. The satirist is interested in saying something about their society, about those in authority. So satire always aims up.
There’s a wonderful poem by somebody whose name I can't remember now, but I remember reading a lot when I was first starting off doing satire and remember this poem which talks about —I think maybe [John] Milton, actually — he says that the satirist doesn’t go after every poor constable who creeps into a taphouse. I think another poet said that satire is not a blunt sword. Satire is like a very, very fine rapier. It cuts the figure in front of it into many pieces, but the figure remains standing. So, it’s a delicate instrument, and it’s used against those in power.
I think jokes aren’t that. I think jokes are a free-for-all. Jokes are like a brawl. I think satire is like a courthouse drama. It has rules. It has etiquette. It has finesse. And, of course, once in a while, you lay a sucker punch to win your case, and you use humour, all the time, of course, but your goal isn’t just to get people to laugh. I can’t remember again who said this, I think maybe [Charles] Baudelaire [who said] that you use humour so that when the mouth is open wide, the truth can slip down.
And I remember my sister, who was our producer for many years but also would write some of the political songs. She was a lawyer who had left the law very disillusioned with things after the darkness that had descended on the courts. So she came, she started working as a producer, and she would write these songs, and then we’d say, okay, Indra would write the songs and then I’ll take them and make them funny, right, because she would just say what needed to be said. And then we would slip a silly line in there, or a silly illusion in there, or a funny pun in there to make people laugh. Yeah, so they hear what’s behind the song.
TINA CARMILLIA: So, talk me through that process more. I’m curious to learn: How do you use satire as a form of dissent or use it for socio-political commentary because I don’t know if it is well understood because we still have ministers [NOTE: It was the ex-Inspector General of the Police.] who are sharing articles from The Onion, thinking that it’s a real news article, right?
JO KUKATHAS: Well, the other thing that happened a lot when we first started Instant Cafe, in the first couple of years, people kept on saying, “Ini bukan budaya kita.” Those who didn’t like it said it’s not our culture.
And so I always counter this by talking about wayang kulit. And wayang kulit is a completely social comedy, and social commentary, right, embedded within the larger story that they’re telling of the Ramayana and the Mahabharata. The telling of it is to say something about what’s going on in your society right now. It isn’t talking about mythical beings. And the reason why people go to watch the wayang kulit is not because of the big story of Rama and Sita and the kidnapping and all the rest of it.
They go for the comic clown characters who appear all the time and are watching Ravana abducting Sita. There’s Rama, lost in the forest. There’s Rama cutting off the nose of Ravana’s sister and then creating all this chaos. There’s Lakshman kind of chasing the deer, all these things… But the characters of Pak Dogol and Pak Long are the ones watching and saying, “What the hell, man? Why are they doing that?” And then talking about things which happened just that day, which was similar, making satirical allusions to them. This is basically to say those people in power are crazy, causing a lot of chaos. They’re making our lives really miserable.
So, for me, political comedy, and political satire, I think it’s part and parcel of every culture. If we want to examine it, we can find it in Chinese culture, in Malay culture, in Indian culture, in Inuit culture. I think it’s part and parcel of what it is to be human, to want to thumb your nose at authority. But the thing is, authority creates systems to make you not. And they would say, “Oh, this is not Confucian.” And Confucianism has been very, very, I think, misrepresented as being this thing which has no sense of humour. But of course, you have that. At the same time, you have Taoism, which is so full of humour, so full of self-mockery, so full of mockery of those who are in authority.
And so I think that the people who don’t understand The Onion are just people who are quite humourless. Well, I don’t like to think that Malaysians don’t understand it. I don’t think it is that. Though we have been told, and we’ve been told over many years, that it’s not our culture. And I think that was one of the big reasons to be very bold about it. This is our culture. People would say, “Oh yeah, and you’re just doing the kind of Western thing,” and then I’d be like, “Nope, here, have a look at this. This is found everywhere.”
And I remember once actually getting into an argument with somebody who told me that irony was a British invention. And I’m like, you can pull out any book of literature from the 12th century around the world, and you’ll find many examples of irony because human beings, I mean, we have a sense of humour.
TINA CARMILLIA: And I think even in the Malay culture, we have bahasa berkias, that’s a way we use language to convey multiple layers of meaning, yeah?
But I was wondering if you could, for instance, evade responsibility for your words and your action on stage for spreading false information. I’m not saying that you are. I’m just saying that, you know, these are some of the allegations that I’m sure people in your industry would have faced, right? Because you’re calling it, “Oh, it’s just comedy, it’s satire,” and you then can evade responsibility and say, “No, no, I’m not responsible for spreading propaganda or misinformation,” you know? Do you see that happening? Do you see that being a potential problem?
JO KUKATHAS: I can’t speak for other people, but I can speak for Instant Cafe in that I don’t think we ever would say that it’s only comedy. I think we would be very happy to say, to claim that, no, we have an intent, we have a purpose, and I’m not going to shy away from that and say, “Oh no, it’s nothing. We didn’t mean anything.”
Unless we are called by the authorities, and then you have to play a game with them because if they admit that this is something which they don’t like, then they are seeing themselves in that. I remember once we were called in by the home ministry. And they talked to us very obliquely about how people were taking advantage of us and, you know, the DAP was taking advantage of us, you know, when you say things like that, people like the DAP will take advantage of you. So, we’re like, “Oh, really? We didn’t know that,” because I don’t feel any responsibility to be truthful to those people who call us in because I don’t believe that they have any authority to call us in. But I will never say to our public, “Oh, it’s just comedy. We’re just making a joke.”
I feel that the joke is purposeful, and I think that the satirist is purposeful, but you don’t need to explain yourself in a way. So, for example, Jonathan Swift, right, when he wrote A Modest Proposal, in which he said there’s a potato famine in Ireland, and nobody’s doing anything about it. So he said, “I have a modest proposal since obviously with a famine in Ireland, and over here in the rest of Great Britain in parliament, they’re not doing anything about it.” Well, he wants to propose to the members of parliament that they suggest eating babies. He said, “There’s a surplus of babies. They’re going to die anyway because of the potato famine. So I would suggest between babies.” Now, of course, there were people who said how dreadful a man he was to propose such a thing because they completely missed the point. He was saying, essentially, that’s what you’re doing — you’re killing people. People are dying because of this. So, since that’s what you’re doing anyway, you might as well just go for it and just eat them. At least then, you’ll solve your famine problem.
As soon as you begin to explain the satire, you kind of lose the point. So you don’t explain it. You make the comedy, and people will then get into a state of mind about it, and they will argue with other people, and they will sort it out. They’ll figure something out. There are those who will feel, “Hold on, I think this is about me,” and not like it very much. But then that’ll make them reflect why is it that they don’t like it. What are they trying to say? Why is everybody laughing when they say that? What’s the truth there that makes people laugh? Because it is the truth which makes you laugh, right, because you recognise something. And that’s really what comedy does. That’s why you feel so free, why you feel so liberated.
I remember one of the longtime Instant Cafe writers, Kam Raslan. He always used to — because I’d always be on stage, I would write, but I’d always be the person on stage as well — and he would always be sitting in the audience. And he said he would love to sit in the audience at every Instant Cafe show. He would always sit in the back because he watched the audience and how they reacted. And they’d be like a collective, like, “No!” And then, like, “What?” And then the forward kind of momentum as they laughed because they’re recognising things as truthful.
I remember at a dinner for finance and trade ministers in Langkawi in the mid-90s, I think, maybe 1988, pre-Reformasi. Anwar Ibrahim was the person who had organised this, I mean, not the organiser, but it was his gig, and they invited us to perform, and we did. He sat at the front table with his head in his hands, and then laughing, and then with his head in his hands, and then laughing, and then his head in his hands… And he said to me later, years later, actually a few years ago, he told me that he got into a lot of trouble after that show with the rest of the Cabinet, who said to him, “Why do you hire Instant Cafe?” And some of the things that [we] said, made fun, they felt, of Dr Mahathir and made Anwar look better. But Anwar said he didn’t feel that it made him look better. He said that’s why he had his head in his hands all the time.
TINA CARMILLIA: And I think comedy in general, but also political satire — it has become more accessible because of social media compared to the ‘80s and ‘90s when you started. At the same time, I think that also allows the authorities to crack down hard and crack down fast. So we see that with a parody account of Bernama, which is our national news agency — I think they call themselves Bermana — their Twitter account was taken down because they were “confusing the public,” right? And then recently, we have the #DengkiKe fiasco with Fahmi Reza, because of the whole vaccine controversy with the royal family, right? What are your thoughts on those elements of humour in an online space?
JO KUKATHAS: Certainly, it has changed everything. When we first started off doing comedy, it was the era when Mohamed Rahmat, then information minister, was trying to ban fax machines because it would allow people to spread information, which he couldn’t control. So it was a very different time. And I think that’s one of the reasons why we wanted to do it. We wanted to do this kind of comedy because we felt, where could you find out any information?
One of the reasons we’re called Instant Cafe is because we, for me, and for the others in the company, when we were thinking of a name, it was the coffee shops where you went to find out what’s going on. Not the newspapers. There was no Internet. The newspapers were just completely propaganda. So where could you go? So that’s why it was like, well, you can go to Aliran. Aliran was a big and very important new source for us, and you’d come to Instant Cafe because we would also have our friends who were kind of connected and get some inside scoops and things. And then we will read those few publications where things were being found out.
Now, of course, there’s a lot more information, and a lot more people are clued in about what’s going on. Definitely, Fahmi really has a big following. So, this is to make an example out of him. And things like Bernama [sic], I really think if they had called themselves something different, they wouldn’t have had the same trouble because The Tapir Times was actually undisturbed for a very long time, but I think it’s because people genuinely get confused by… Ber-what?
TINA CARMILLIA: Bermana.
JO KUKATHAS: People were genuinely confused and sharing news stories, I think, it then got to the point where people were full of ire, and then they were irritated, so they reported it because when you’ve been fooled, you get irritated, then you report. And then [the authorities] were like, “Oh yes, this is wrong. You’re confusing people,” because they literally had been confusing people. And I think if you just leave it alone, after a while, people would have realised this, but you know, elsewhere in the world, articles on The Onion still get so get shared as if it is real news. And that’s the reality.
One of my characters YBeeee has a Twitter account, and he sometimes is very active, sometimes not so active, but I’ve always really loved it when people write to me and tell me I’m an idiot for saying certain things, because they really think that’s a YB character. They have no idea about Instant Cafe or Jo Kukathas, or anything like that, and YBeeee only ever writes like he’s YBeeee. And some people have written to me, like, “How dare you? How could you say such things?” And, of course, I never reply as myself. I’ve only ever replied as YBeeee. I think, at some point, they’ll figure it out. It’s okay. I think the same thing would have happened with Bermana.
TINA CARMILLIA: And the difference in mediums — obviously, with the live audience on stage, you have a clear view in real-time, the reaction of the audience to your performance. But online, you are separated from the real-time reaction of your audience. How much does the medium matter in getting that message across?
JO KUKATHAS: I think the medium can be anything, really. I think the medium is just the medium, whether you’re using Twitter or YouTube or live performances.
Honestly, the reason I haven’t been doing so much that’s satirical is because I kind of got a bit tired of it. And I feel like there’s a lot of people now, having those voices. When we first started Instant Cafe, it was because we felt like, come on guys, let’s say something, because nobody was, apart from [Rafique] Rashid, you know, doing anything like this, and we felt it was a necessity.
Now I feel like, you know, I don’t need to do that anymore. There are a lot of people doing it and doing it really well. And honestly, especially since this last backdoor government, I just think I don’t want to waste my time with them because everything they do and say just gets me too angry for comedy even.
Yeah, but I think it’s okay. There are many other people out there, you know, calling them names, putting them in their place, saying, “You have no clothes, look at yourself in the mirror.” That’s what it’s really all about, whatever medium you want to work on.
For myself, for example, I did this show many years ago. I think it was maybe 2011, 2012, where it was Ribena Berry, but I was performing at a PKR function, a PKR fundraising dinner. And there are so many people who say, “Oh, but that means you’re pro-PKR.” And I said, “No, I’m anti-corruption, I’m anti what this government stands for. I’m anti-racism. So PKR hires me to do a job. I mean, look, UMNO hired me in the past. And now PKR is hiring me. I will still say what I want to say, we criticise both sides, but if one side is doing much more damage, they’re the side that’s going to get criticised more.
They filmed that show, and then put it online. Actually, they didn’t ask me. And somebody said to me they saw the show online. So I went to talk to them, and they said they were really sorry. And I said I don’t mind it being out there, but you should ask, that’s all. But that got a lot of likes. A lot. And so, suddenly, Ribena Berry was being seen by many more people than she would ordinarily have been seen by, and I was quite happy about that because I think what she said. I stand by what she said.
And the other thing was after the, okay, which was the election where they talked about the ‘Chinese tsunami’? Was it the 2014 elections? [NOTE: It was the 2013 general elections.] I think that’s when I started doing the series called #TanyaYBeeee. So, YBeeee has these short clips, which you can find on YouTube. A friend of mine called me up and said, “Jo, do you want to do this?” because I appeared on his show as YBeeee, and I was like, “Yeah, I’ve got so much upset inside me I need to go out there and make comedy.” I’d come in every few weeks, and they would ask me questions, and I would improvise, or sometimes I’d write the answers down, and I knew what I was gonna say, and then they cut them and put them as clips on YouTube. And it’s really interesting to me that so many years later, people are still watching those clips. For me, I’m really happy about that. I’m really glad that those things are out there. Sometimes, I come across one where I can’t remember at all that I had said this. And I’d think, “Yeah, this is funny.” Or rather, YBeeee is funny.
So I think that having that kind of material out there, in whatever form, is good. Whether it’s like Fahmi, it’s very image-driven, Zunar is image-driven; it really reaches a mass audience because of that, which is also, I think, really important. It’s the equivalent of graffiti, basically, right? In the past, you’d go and put it on walls everywhere, but now, you can do graffiti, and when I say graffiti, I don’t diminish the graffiti. Oh, I’m a big fan of graffiti. I mean, it’s art. And now you have graffiti that can travel around the Internet at super speed, and it’s just great. It’s great.
TINA CARMILLIA: But we also have the MCMC, the Malaysian Communication and Multimedia Commission… And also, with the change in government, we’ve had a couple, in the last few years. Does it affect your materials? Does it affect your work, or…?
JO KUKATHAS: I think that for over 32 years, you see a lot of swings. You see things as being very cyclical. They are. But, you see, the thing about our government is that it is not a very organised force. It’s not Singapore. They have a very clear policy about dissent, and they follow it to the letter. Here it’s like suddenly somebody will notice something and go, “Eh!” And then, noise, and then — so you know the noise will die down. I feel, in a way, that’s why we have so many people who do speak up in this country because they know that there’ll be trouble for a while and then it’ll die down.
And you just get clever about how you do your satire so that it can’t be seen as making fun. If you play the long game — you need to be in the game — so you need to be clever about how you do it. There’s no point just sort of like boldly calling it out. As I said, it’s not a blunt instrument. It’s a rapier, right? So that the person is going, “What, what, what? What’s just happened?” And I think this way is much more subversive because, basically, it tells everybody you can be smart, and you can be safe, and you can say what you want. Freedom of expression is important. We all need to be able to, in some way, express who we are, and you figure out how best to say it and stay alive. Not to stay alive — sounds a bit dramatic, but to stay and speak again another day. So you’ve gotta be smart, you’ve gotta change tactics, you’ve got to play the fool, the wise fool.
TINA CARMILLIA: It’s an art onstage and offstage, I suppose.
JO KUKATHAS: Yeah, therefore, how you deal with those in authority is also an art, yes. It’s a dance, really, because, the way I see it is, those in authority are also just doing what they think is their job. That’s the way of the world — there are those in power, and there are those who are not in power. And those who are not in power will always have a problem, or should always have a problem, with those who are in power to make sure that people in power don’t get above themselves. We have, in the Westminster system, a system that says that the government are the servants of the people, but often they act like our masters. They act like a feudal system, and we are the serfs. These reminders of our relationship is very important.
And it’s really interesting to me that the present government have made a few mistakes like that. Anything you do, any YouTube video, has to go through us, for example. Then the furoré, the bite back. In fact, they had to back down because you need to have a government which is afraid of you. That’s democracy, a government where they’re afraid of the people and then they will figure out how to keep people happy but also listen to the minority voice.
At the same time, I always go and check to see what’s trending in Malaysia. And as much as you can make, you can have #MakeSchoolASaferPlace trending, it’ll be trending for a little while, but BTS will always out-trend.
It also makes me think, you know what? That’s not a bad thing because, ultimately, people want to be left alone, just to enjoy themselves and get on with it. And if a huge majority of the Malaysian population loves Korean pop culture, you know what? I think that can only be good for us in the long run because why can we so readily embrace something which is not Islamic, not Malay-centric, not nationalistic, but just something just completely different from us? That tells me something about what people actually want, as opposed to what the government is telling people they want, and what the identity we aspire to be — a kind of internationalist cultural identity as opposed to what you’re being told your nationalist, narrow identity.
TINA CARMILLIA: And speaking of lies and also comedy, it is storytelling, isn’t it? And if you’re a good storyteller, you can sell a good story. People will buy it. It creates religion, and it’s behind some of the best marketing campaigns, isn’t it? A good story is at the core of it.
JO KUKATHAS: For sure. When I first started off doing work in Instant Cafe, I didn’t see myself as being a writer. Rather, I was an actor. We wanted to say something. We would find a way. And we experimented with all kinds of ways to get material, improvise, write down, spend three hours in a room to come up with two lines, and we learned a lot from each other. And over the time we saw some people were better writers. They wrote more. I found myself a better director than a writer, so I directed more. We had to read a lot more plays, and then your best teachers are your audience because you’d know what would work and what wouldn’t. You would learn rhythm, timing. Comedy is a very difficult business. We always say, “Dying is easy, comedy is hard,” because you get one thing wrong, and it can all just go wrong.
All countries have narratives, and our national narrative is so dominant, which is why I think all we do is provide counter-narratives to the dominant narrative. And then what you do in your work, what I do in my work, whether it’s through comedy or journalism or a whole host of other things. These are all just presenting counter-narratives, so we know that no nation is made up of one narrative. I think one of the reasons I really dislike that 1Malaysia concept was because it’s, well, you’re trying to decide what our narrative is. And you don’t get to decide. We get to decide. We get to decide how complex we are.
One of the roles of satire is to deal with sacred cows, right? In that way, we are foot soldiers to these movements. We are the clowns to those movements. We are not the movement itself. We’re just part of it. We’re part of something bigger. We’re part of Reformasi, we’re part of #MakeSchoolASaferPlace, we’re part of pro-democracy, anti-xenophobia, anti-racism movements because humour is very necessary.
TINA CARMILLIA: How do you see comedy and political satire, and the importance of it, especially in this post-Trump, post-truth era? Certainly, there’s a space for it. But how do you see it playing a role in, for instance, sparking conversations about real social issues and other serious issues?
JO KUKATHAS: Yeah, I’ll see go back to the idea of saying the emperor has no clothes. We can still go behind the curtain. And no amount of people saying, well, that’s fake news, that’s post-truth... We have to be intelligent also to be able to sift for ourselves.
And, of course, comedy doesn’t just come from the left wing. You have your right-wing comedians, too, who are painting a very different narrative. The worry I have more is that we’re going to end up living in silos where we’re not listening to each other at all because I think that we should listen to what the right-wing commentators have to say, even though, I think, for the most part, they’re saying things I don’t believe in because I believe in a much more open, tolerant society with much more equality for all. And I think many right-wing organisations are very much more protectionist. And I think, on the left, we’re a bit more messy about inclusion, and think, well, it will work out in the long run. I do feel there’s a role to play.
Let’s say, for example, #MakeSchoolASaferPlace. I really love this campaign, I’m so happy that it’s taken off. I hope it continues. But even there, there’s a lot of beautiful art being made, very powerful art being made. And sometimes, it’s also art, which is making fun of those who don’t understand why this is so important. It paints the male teacher, for example, in a very bad light. And I think it is necessary for us not to give them so much credit because they are wrong, but they’re small people, they’re small men who act like this. Let’s not make them into big demons who are. They are not worthy enough to be that. We need to pull them down.
One of the roles of satire is to deal with sacred cows, right? In that way, we are foot soldiers to these movements. We are the clowns to those movements. We are not the movement itself. We’re just part of it. We’re part of something bigger. We’re part of Reformasi, we’re part of #MakeSchoolASaferPlace, we’re part of pro-democracy, anti-xenophobia, anti-racism movements because humour is very necessary. Otherwise, we become very dour and as I said earlier, you open your mouth wide so the truth can fall in.
TINA CARMILLIA: Well, that’s quite the note to end on. That’s writer, actor and director Jo Kukathas of The Instant Cafe Theatre Company on the subject of political satire on The Starting Block.
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CREDITS
Guest: Jo Kukathas
Producer/Host: Tina Carmillia
Music: Theme for Harold (var. 3) by Kevin MacLeod, licensed under CC BY 4.0.
If you have a chance how would you redo this interview in light of the ongoing Russian Invasion of Ukraine? President Zelenskyy is a former comedian himself who played the fictional President of Ukraine before becoming one.
I read her online eulogy for Jit Murad recentl, it was very well written, she is a thoughtful individual