Review: Sharul Channa Hits The Crackhouse – Feminist Reacts
Our team popped by the Crackhouse Comedy Club last Friday to watch Singaporean female standup act Sharul Channa. Tagging along was our special guest, Sarah Amer, to share her thoughts on the experience.
Last week at the Crackhouse Comedy Club, Singaporean comedienne Sharul Channa graced us with her brazen sense of humour.
But before we even go there, let’s find out how the three local opening acts did.
The Openers
First up was Prakash Daniel.
The proud owner of Instagram’s account is a regular face at the Crackhouse. Often seen in the venue sporting the funkiest, hippest casual wear, Prakash performed his regular repertoire which met with a more subdued response this time round. This was no fault of his own, as his audience members are frequent visitors to the comedy club and most of them must have experienced his set before.
As an emcee however, Prakash made some of the best comments and jokes in between performances. We’d attempt to recall what those were but sharing a comedian’s material in writing feels like a criminal act.
Besides, we were too busy scarfing down the Crackhouse’s RM3 per slice moist pumpkin cake to jot down any notes.
RM3 for a slice of cake in Kuala Lumpur.
Let’s just let that sink in for a while.
Next was Kavin Jay.
Kavin took the room by storm with his brand of humour. Punchline after punchline hit audiences leaving everyone in stitches. By this point of the night, we were worried for the headliner.
Kavin is the most established of all three openers. Outside the standup scene, this big brown guy is a radio host as well as a theatre performer, recently appearing in Joanne Kam’s cabaret/sketch extravaganza Kam In Your Face 2.
Last of the three was Rizal van Geyzel.
We were slightly worried for Rizal to be honest. As fans of the venue, we’ve seen him several times on stage prior to this. His material tends towards awkward, offensive humour which creates a polarizing effect. This is especially troubling if your set also involves audience participation.
Tonight however, Rizal surprised everyone. It was literally quite (for lack of a better word) amazing watching him shine. His energy was high and his jokes were fresh. Just before the show began, he was slaving away at the bar with Crackhouse mamasan Marinah. In essence, if we had to pick a heartthrob of the night it would be this multitasking extraordinaire.
Our Guest
Now that we’ve got all three out of the way, let’s begin with a little secret.
We brought along someone special to the Crackhouse.
Activist Sarah Amer who recently organized Kota Wanita was invited as our guest. Sarah had always been interested in seeing how a woman would fare in a male-dominated scene. She was stoked to hear that there was a female headliner coming to the Crackhouse and was keen to watch Sharul in action.
The 23 year old documentary-maker was last featured in The Star, where she talked about her influences and her views as a feminist.
We chose Sarah because her upcoming panel discussion ‘Bukan Sekadar Bicara: Perempuan Dan Filem‘, which is on next Friday, discusses the decline in quality of female roles on screen, displaying that she really does care about public perception towards women in the arts.
The Headliner
So the night officially began as Sharul got on stage and dove right into her set.
Her repertoire consists of many different topics. There were jokes on marriage, weight loss, relatives, expats, clubbing, and most satisfying of all, Western appropriation of Indian culture.
Sharul is a particularly aggressive comic, and one who seeks no apology for the things she says.
“This is an Indian woman on stage, don’t play with me!” she threatened a smart-aleck in the audience at one point.
There’s no heckling or messing around with Sharul; she will tear you to shreds. Her humour is high in amplitude, if that makes sense. She’s a comedienne with a lot of power and presence on stage. It felt like she had more balls than all the men who came before her, combined.
The only catch is that when she does go wrong, it’s quite hard to miss. One or two of her jokes fell flat and there was a minute or two of awkward questioning with the audience. Despite this, performing to a full house in a multi-cultural city is no easy feat, so kudos to her.
Amusingly, she targeted our poor Sarah Amer and simply called her ‘tetek’ throughout the set.
This female comedienne reduced a staunch feminist to just ‘tetek’ for an entire hour.
We wanted to know how conflicted Sarah must have felt during the time but we daren’t ask in case Sharul noticed us talking during her set.
As soon as the performance ended, we left the Crackhouse Comedy Club to have a quick chat with Sarah.
The Verdict
At Artisan’s coffee in TTDI, we sat down and placed our order. Sarah was in a dilemma.
“I’m pretty much convinced that everything that just happened in the past half hour is probably why there’s a misconception that women have to be: a) crazy, b) sexually charged, or c) play really bitchy characters in order to be funny,” she frowns. “I don’t get that.”
It was a classic case of expectation mismatch.
In fact, much of Sharul’s material were based on female stereotypes, which left Sarah deeply dissatisfied.
“These kind of comedians are the kind of comedians that instead of empowering women, they’re buying into the stereotype and all of the sexual bias that women are trying to fight against,” she reasons.
To us, this was a tricky issue considering that Sharul was performing to an alien crowd. In Sharul’s defense, by reaching for the lowest common denominator she would be able to broaden her appeal and build a more mainstream audience.
“It’s perpetuating people who are making inappropriate jokes under the context of it being funny,” Sarah insists. “It’s not funny! Another woman objectifying a woman. I mean half the time she was making fun of my tits.”
Despite the veiled compliment within the ‘tetek’ jokes, Sarah was not impressed.
“I feel like she was sort of adapting something, like, you know what we call the ‘male gaze’? Saying everything a man wants to say but it’s a woman saying it so it’s perfectly fine.”
Is Sarah being unreasonable? Are her expectations too high for the matter?
“Look at Tina Fey,” Sarah reminds us. “Look at women like Amy Poehler.”
This brought us back to reality. American funnywomen Tina and Amy have made huge strides in comedy. They’ve even hosted the Golden Globes twice.
On the rare occasion both women mine the stereotype for material, they’ve always given it a twist. Most of the time, their material often reflect upon the environment we live in.
“I really appreciate it when comedians do their groundwork and touch upon socio-cultural issues, and also make it a point to intellectually stimulate the audience as well as being funny,” Sarah states. “That’s something that’s underdone.”
“It’s easy to crack a sexist or a sizeist or racist joke, anyone could do that, but to be funny, really f***ing funny, you have to be original and really know your shit lah.”
Though Sarah didn’t relate to the material Sharul prepared for us, she still lauded the fact that there was a ballsy female comedian in Asia, touring the region.
“You can look at it both ways,” Sarah began, complimentary. “You can look at it being empowering for the female. To be taking on things that, you know, women aren’t supposed to talk that way or act that way, but I think there’s a subtlety to it that needs to be done.”
“It’s comedy, it’s a very difficult thing to do, and I applaud her for her effort.”
But before Sarah said goodbye, she had a stunning discovery she wanted to share regarding the Crackhouse Comedy Club.
“I’m pretty much convinced it’s the cheapest place to eat cake in KL. Try the pumpkin cake, it’s RM3.”
* Local laughs every Wednesday and Thusday nights, along with more quality stand-up acts at the Crackhouse Comedy Club on Lorong Rahim Kajai, Taman Tun Dr Ismail.
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