Kuah Jenhan – Noted With Thanks

Popular across Asia – and MICF stalwart - comedian Kuah Jenhan finally got himself a ‘real job’.  At thirty-five.  In advertising.  For the same reasons anyone gets a real job.  His comedian mates accused him of selling out.  Kuah admits that’s true; he did sell out – for a regular wage, health care, paid holidays, superannuation…  For him, the lot of comedians who don’t sell out, who keep their integrity, is ‘crying in the streets’ – Kuah sees them as he rides past in his car.  Mean, huh? Or just realistic?

Kuah discovered, anyway, after a steep learning curve, that he was good at the job!  He had to learn corporate language – such as team-speak, to say ‘we’ and not egotistical ‘I’ – plus the circumlocutions of business emails.  The title of his show is from one of those emails.  When he was finally able to answer a client’s multiple ridiculous questions, the response came back, ‘Noted with thanks.’  

But Kuah can’t resist comedy (and making comedy out of his job) and here he is, back at the Melbourne Comedy Festival again.  He has an infectious smile, is immensely likeable, amiable, but dry as dust at the same time.  At a guess, two-thirds of my audience were Asian, and I’d say they certainly got more jokes and references than I did - they were eating it up.

He’s Malay-Chinese and his speciality – and he’s very good at it - is first, pointing up the peculiarities (or absurdities) of Malaysia’s complicated, multicultural, four language (we heard them all) society (sometimes contrasting that with ‘white’ culture), and doing that by telling stories.  He is in essence, a great storyteller, vividly creating scenes which have a twist or a sting in the tail as he conjures up all the characters.  He still gets corporate gigs where he supposedly has to be funny for people who don’t want to laugh…  But the money is great.  One of these – where he was treated with bewildering, unaccustomed respect – turned out to be doing his spiel at 7.30 am for an audience of four- to eight-year-olds.  Rapid adjustment to his routine required. 

Kuah is a very funny guy who gives us painless but pointed insights into his culture with a few jabs in passing at English-speaking ‘white’ culture.  It’s too gentle to be satirical.  His show is more a matter of easily laughing along with him rather than a side-splitting roller coaster ride.  But he provides a very good time and leaves his audience happy.

Michael Brindley