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JONATHAN Lim is no stranger to the
stage — or biting sarcasm. The man
behind such productions as Wild
Rice’s pantomimes Jack and the
Beansprout and Oi! Sleeping Beauty,
as well as last year’s Homesick, the veteran
actor, playwright and director is also the
one constant in Singapore’s only live parody
show — Chestnuts.
The show, which began as a two-man
sketch comedy act featuring Lim and Sean
Yeo but now features Hossan Leong, has
evolved into a cultural institution.
Chestnuts pokes fun at everything from
politics to movies to local theatre and remains
the only production of its kind in Singapore
even 10 years after it began.
TODAY sat down with Lim last week to
talk about “The Tongue Quartet”, why no
one has tried to replicate the Chestnut
formula and why it’s so hard to be funny
in Singapore.
It has been 10 years of Chestnuts
now. Is there any concern the
shows might be getting a bit stale?
The good thing about Chestnuts is
that it is a comedy format, first and foremost.
The content keeps changing, the
details are always developing.
It will only become stale if
the public and the media don’t
give us anything new to poke fun
at. But you can always trust Hollywood,
local theatre companies
and Singapore itself to come up
with something new for us to
laugh at.
There have been years when
it was hard to come up with material
because the year was dry.
But last year was very rich. Just counting
musicals alone, we had Cabaret, Forbidden
City and Little Shop of Horrors plus big
films like Casino Royale, Poseidon, Memoirs
of a Geisha and Brokeback Mountain.
That’s also why we’re doing Chestnuts
as a four-man show this year. We’ve
added Judy Ngo and Rodney Oliveiro so we
can expand the scale and scope of our
spoofs.
Ooh, we should call it the Tongue
Quartet. We’re having so much fun now as
a quartet — we’ll probably keep it going.
Do Singaporeans take themselves
too seriously?
It’s not that we want to, but we’ve
been bred to. We live in a country
that takes itself very seriously, so
it’s the easiest way to get by. The climate
is one of deadly earnestness, and it’s a frequency
we all know and are comfortable in.
That’s why when we do laugh at ourselves,
it’s such a huge relief. Not that we
can’t, we just seldom do, because the avenues
are so rare. Maybe just twice a year,
at Chestnuts and Dim Sum Dollies.
The climate is changing though. The
next generation will have a much more
balanced view of things, now that nationbuilding
is done.
Have there been moments while
doing the show when you’ve
gone: “Uh oh, we shouldn’t have
gone there”?
No, simply because if it’s a sensitive
issue, we tend to tackle it from an unexpected
angle, so that you laugh first, then
go: “Wait a minute, I can’t believe they actually
said that.”
I think that’s one of the
cool things about doing Chestnuts.
We’re sneaky that way.
We’re not as direct as other
local comedies need to be.
Stand-up, for example, has to be
more direct, but we spoof, so we
can take advantage of twists
and turns.
Or we do it by simply being
so brazen and sudden that you don’t have
time to get your defences up. Laughter
first, regret later. (laughs)
Why haven’t we seen more
shows like Chestnuts here?
We don’t have many people — actors,
writers, directors — who love
comedy enough to create it in its purest
forms. It takes a certain sort of weird
mentality to put on a comedy show of this
nature. Ivan Heng and Glen Goei direct
comedy really well, but it’s comedic drama,
so it’s drama first, comedy second. Chestnuts
is different.
This is probably the only show here
that’s comedy first. For example, we use different
styles of drama
(like musical theatre,
or even wayang kulit
or shadow puppetry)
for comedy, not the
other way around.
You set everything up
all for the sake of the
laughs.
Why do our actors only like
drama-drama/actor-actor roles?
Because we haven’t had enough of
it: We haven’t had a steady enough diet of
solid writing with rich roles. So much of
local writing is for ensembles, so few people
(short of Karen Tan) get to play a
string of good roles. Even, say, two to
three full roles a year, who’s had that
chance? It’s rare because the writing just
isn’t there.
Also, actors always hanker after what
they haven’t done yet. Singaporean actors
do comedy quite a lot because most
of our writers are comic — like Michael Chiang,
Ovidia Yu, Desmond Sim. But
the heavier stuff poses a greater challenge
because it’s new territory.
Besides Chestnuts, you directed
Alfian Bin Sa’at’s Homesick and
Sim’s Jack and the Beansprout last
year: All satirical pieces poking fun at
just about everything, including Singapore
politics. How have you managed
to avoid getting into hot water?
We made a discovery with Chestnuts over
the past few years, with sketches like
the Today in Senate spoof of parliamentary
news and other current affairs spoofs: We
were shamelessly political, yet because it
was via Star Wars, the audience were fully
open to it and just went wild.
No one complained. There was no
basis to get upset or sensitive — it’s too
elusive — and I think that’s the challenge
for Chestnuts. It’s also something a lot of
theatre companies have learned.
It’s not that you can’t do it, but if you
do it lazily you will get slapped. If you’re
going to just stand up on your soapbox and
wave your fists, it’s
blunt and it’s tasteless,
and when you get tasteless,
you upset people
rather than intrigue
them.
My point is not to
upset people, my point
is to entertain people
first, and then make
some points through entertainment.
Are you a serious person in
real life?
Very. I’m broody and twisted. My
fascinations lie in the supernatural
and usually the macabre
and violent. One of my favourite movies
is The Texas Chainsaw Massacre (both the
original and the remake).
That’s why when I wrote Sleeping
Beauty in 2005, it was dark compared to
last year’s Jack by Desmond Sim, which I
directed. When I write a fairy tale, there
must be grotesque monsters and people
must die.
So is it true that fat people make
funny people?
I think it’s just that unusual body
types work. They break the norm. That’s
why Hossan (who’s skinny) and me work.
If my comedy partner was the same
height and size as me, it wouldn’t make
any sense. All the great comedy teams
like French and Saunders, Ah Pui-Ah San,
Laurel and Hardy, Fry and Laurie, even
Edina and Patsy in Absolutely Fabulous,
even the Dim Sum Dollies — you have to
play the contrasts.
And it’s unexpected too — your average-
shaped person doesn’t know what’s
going to come out of these people because
they’re not like that.
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28 TODAY • Wednesday • January 10, 2007
Professional heckler Jonathan Lim talks about twisted humour, fat people and death by earnestness
ROYAL JESTER: Lim
will spoof the Empress
in Forbidden City in
Forbidden Chestnuts –
Portrait of a Brokeback
Geisha.
David Chew
david.chew@newstoday.com.sg FORBIDDENCHESTNUTS
IT’S double the fun at this year’s ball of laughs
as the traditional two-man team (Lim and
Hossan Leong) expands into a quartet for the
first time with the addition of actors Judy Ngo
and Rodney Oliveiro.
Along with the usual spoof subjects –
movies, plays, TV, musicals and even advertisements
– a certain judge from the MediaCorp
Channel 5 show The Dance Floor and the
Moses Lim/Elizabeth Tan-hosted Explore
Singapore! programme are also in for a ribbing.
There is also a Ten Year Series sequence
featuring some old audience favourites that
were pulled out of the archive for the entertainment
of fans both old and new.
Audience members may even see some of
the humour targets – such as actor Lim Yu-
Beng or even singer/actress Kit Chan – sitting
among them and watching themselves being
spoofed onstage.
WHAT: FORBIDDEN CHESTNUTS –
PORTRAIT OF A BROKEBACK GEISHA
WHEN: UNTIL JAN 20
WHERE: DRAMA CENTRE. TICKETS FROM
GATECRASH.
tenonquestions e
+newsmaker
TODAY • Wednesday • January 10, 2007 29
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FUNNY THINGS DON’T HAPPEN TO ME, I STAGE THEM. AND THEN THEY HAVE TO
BE REHEARSED, DESIGNED, MARKETED AND FEATURED IN TODAY. “
Tell us the funniest thing that happened
to you last year.
Funny things don’t happen to me, I
stage them. And then they have to be rehearsed,
designed, marketed and featured in
TODAY (laughs).
Finally, what’s on your list of
New Year’s resolutions for
Singapore theatre people?
Right now, I would say more new work,
new writing, new everything. No repeats.
Or even if you have to redo something,
break away from the old version. I’m not saying
you can’t revive things, but please put
new life in it.
I don’t believe we should throw out the
old things, but I don’t think we should
hide behind them. That’s number one.
I also wish we would take theatre
a lot more seriously. By we, I mean
everyone, theatre companies included.
We’re doing it too easily nowadays,
we’re churning shows out so easily,
we’re hardly challenging ourselves
anymore, let alone the audiences.
Too many shows were big
and grand, but they were really easy,
you could have done them in your
sleep. We need theatre to lose sleep
over. It’s got to possess and haunt
you — then it comes out as something
that makes the audience’s
hair stand on end and it sticks
in their memory for years —
theatre worth seeing and
worth having done,
rather than just theatre-
by-numbers.
We need some
freshness to challenge
our standards and
for us to keep climbing
up. In short: More
time, more energy, more
innovation, more risk.
Are Singaporeans getting better
at laughing at themselves?
Tell us at plus@newstoday.com.sg
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