Bought a ticket to Your Mother!/Niamah! put on by Serious Comedy Studio some weeks ago with some expectations set by this premise...
The good, the bad and the ugly truth about the Chinese!
Do the Chinese really know about themselves? Analyze Mandarin, you will burst into laughter, you will be amazed by their genius and believe it or not, you will get a RUDE SHOCK of their prejudices towards MANY things. They seem to have legalized prejudice and they don’t give it a second thought…..until now! Ni Amah! (Your Mother)
Written, directed, produced and acted by a Kling Kuai with the help of a Malai Kuai in the language of the Kuai Loh.
It's a really short run - 3 shows each in Penang yesterday and in KL today: 12 p.m., 4 p.m., and 8.30 p.m.
I heard of their previous production, To Potong or Not to Potong? and had wanted to watch it, but things happen and I didn't. So I didn't want to miss this.
Got to KLPac with less than 10 minutes to spare and in time for the doors to open. I had not been upstairs for ages and had never been in KLPac's Indiecine (which is used for their movie screenings, smaller than both main stages) before, so this was a first for me. As it was free seating, everyone jostled through the door, waiting for the young woman to tear the tickets for admission. Thankfully I got a seat I wanted (aisle seat on the fifth row; when you're not very tall, you do what you can). I had never seen so many aunties and uncles for any show in KLPac... in recent memory, anyway.
Show started a few minutes after 4 p.m., which is not too bad considering you normally have to wait at least 15 minutes before the house lights go out and for the show to start. To be honest, I was a little concerned seeing a presentation projection on the wall - I thought it was gonna be a bit like An Inconvenient Truth. Fortunately, it turned out to be way funnier than that.
You know how you sometimes see pictures/infographics online about how complicated the English language can be? Well, it's something like that, but with the Chinese language (including dialects like Hokkien and Cantonese), presented by writer/producer/bao ka liao Sathira Morgan with the "lovely" Fatima(h) [well okay, it's a guy in drag, real name Hafez Nasruddin], where they took turns talking about the "intricacies" of the language.
It was about an hour and 15 minutes long (give or take) and it's pretty funny, masalah teknikal aside. You don't have to be Chinese educated to get this; in fact, they'll teach you some Chinese words in the show. That part reminded me of how certain bananas I knew learnt Mandarin. Heck, seeing the characters in the Chinese characters and translating what I read into English were some of the ways I survived primary school* :P
After the show ended, Hafez took off his wig and when his real (might I add, deep and sexy) voice came out, everyone burst out laughing in surprise (we're not laughing at you, but with you, Hafez). And then they went on to plug their other shows - they need all the support they can get.
Was it worth the RM45 ticket price? Maybe. But I'll definitely catch the next show if I can.
*PS. Being Chinese-educated SOME (kinda survived the six years plus the one year of POL class in secondary school), I didn't quite get some of the Cantonese slang terms, but in my defense, I didn't speak it until secondary school because it wasn't allowed in primary school; it's an actual thing. People I knew after primary school didn't know I went to Chinese school until Chinese came out of my mouth. So I occasionally refer to myself as a "functional/pseudo-banana" since I otherwise don't read anything Chinese, watch the shows or listen to the music on my own volition.]
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