J.Panicker

I am a sicko, I know this. Because I came out of Vidura Bandara Rajapakse’s only Singapore show, as part of his Paradise Gothic tour, with a very Singaporean complaint: he could have really gone for our jugular but held back.

His set ranged from the travails of being a corporate slave in a soul-sucking company culture to geopolitical tensions delivered with the mechanical, detached air of poetic metaphor. At one point, he joked that tourists leave France with lower self-esteem, and wished Sri Lanka could inspire the same feeling in visitors someday. I understood this immediately. In fact, I had arrived hoping to leave with a little less self-esteem than I already had. I was looking forward to walking out with the remnants of my self-worth small enough to fit into my teeny purse.

Then, midway through, VBR finally turned his attention to Singapore itself, to the oddness of standing in a room full of people who had paid to watch him say, quite plainly, that he hated Singaporeans. And honestly? I wanted him to commit.

Having lived in Johor Bahru while studying medicine, VBR spoke about what he had in common with Malaysians, which gave the Singapore jokes extra bite. This was not lazy outsider mockery. It felt more familiar than that, like someone who knew exactly which regional sibling-rivalry nerve to press. His description of Singapore as “what happens when you make a mall a city” was okay, and can hurt in the way only an accurate joke does. He also poked at this habit of claiming culture a little too confidently, pointing out that laksa is not even as Singaporean as we like to think, and that so much of what we claim as ours is originally Malaysian. WORD!

It was specific, uncomfortable, and delivered with enough comic precision to make the insult feel oddly intimate. My only gripe is that I wanted more of it. More needling. More mall-city slander. More cultural theft allegations. More of him dragging us through our national delusions until we emerged, humbled and preferably less smug.

So VBR hates Singaporeans, and I regret to inform him that at least one of us had a wonderful time. Please come back and properly lower my self-esteem.