Live comedy flies well in Jakarta

By Maria Kegel

JAKARTA (JP): Telling a funny joke comes down to timing, and the same can be said for the inception of the Jakarta Comedy Club, held monthly at the Mandarin Hotel ballroom.

Television director and producer Ian Carless, one of the three organizers and creators of the club, said for some reason the timing had never been right to launch a live comedy club in this part of Asia.

That is, not until he arrived in Jakarta last year.

Its quick success has been no laughing matter: The Jakarta Comedy Club is in its fourth month and already the Bali Comedy Club is up and running. The Kuala Lumpur Comedy Club also opens this week.

Carless said the idea for the club was not an original one.

A popular comedy venue has been operating in Hong Kong for a number of years and Carless said he wanted to try a similar thing when he was based in the Philippines, but it did not get off the ground until he met up with a friend at a bar here and suggested the idea.

Carless's college friend in London, who knows many comedians, was then brought into the picture to book all the acts from the UK. And the stage was set.

"When we did sit down and decide to do the comedy club, there was this shared consensus with a whole bunch of people sitting round a table saying 'yeah, we could all do with a laugh'. Someone just said that as a quip, but it's true, though, to the extent that we just tag it on as a bit of a byline for the comedy club."

He stressed that they were a club and that there were no ticket sales, just monthly memberships priced at Rp 275,000 per person, which were always sold in advance. The maximum is 300 memberships for each event.

"Last month we were having to throw in extra chairs and there was no table space, but I think this month will be a bit quieter as a lot of people are on holiday."

Each show falls around the third week of the month and this Friday is the fourth meeting for the club.

Leading English comedy magician Paul Zenon and Irish stand-up comedian Owen O'Neill, who have both appeared countless times on TV and enjoyed critical acclaim at home in UK, will grace the stage on July 20 with their superb wit.

Carless said they pushed the comedy club aspect of it as they had realized with the amount of time that expatriates had been out here, nobody knew the names of top performers anymore.

"What we try and get across with the fact that (it is a club) is every month we'll have two comedians for you to come and watch regardless of who the individuals actually are, just to get people used to the routine, the schedule and that's what we do every month," he said.

Top comedians

Only top performing comedians make it to the stage of the Jakarta Comedy Club and Carless said they stayed clear of performers who were rude or resorted to sexual connotations as it would not go well with the discerning audience here.

"However, in terms of comics having a go at the audience, that's fair game."

The opposite has also held true in past performances, though, and Carless stood corrected after he assured one of the first comedians to come over that Jakarta's audiences were nice, tame and would not heckle.

"But the minute he got up on stage they all started to heckle him," he said.

"I think comedians in general don't like it. They may like heckling if it's amusing and constructive but if they shout out obscenities, it can be well, you've had one beer too many."

Since comedians are professionals with many performances under their belt, they have different ways of handling those situations and all of them came prepared with putdowns for hecklers, he said.

"The last guy, Ross Noble, who was a bit chubby, was a riot. When he walked out on stage nobody said a word and then somebody shouted, 'You fat bastard!' He just took it right in his stride and said 'I may be fat, but there's a reason for that. And the reason is every time I do your mother, she gives me a biscuit'."

He basically told the heckler that he was not going to win as he had the microphone, Carless said.

"I think you have to be pretty brave or pretty drunk to go at a comedian onstage with a microphone."

Carless said the majority of humor travels well over here and when comedians visited they asked if there was anything they should not touch on.

"The only two things that we always tell them to steer clear of is politics and religion, two sensitive issues given the area we are living in, but other than that, we pretty much leave them to get on with it."

The Jakarta audience is very international and Carless estimated that expatriates make up 70 percent of the audience, with "a third British, a third English and a third of everybody else, including Germans, Dutch, Swedes and Kiwis".

With such a mixed audience, Carless said comedians realize that it was in their best interest to make the humor as accessible as possible by keeping it on an international level and that none of the humor was parochial.

"None of the comedians want to get up there and fall dead on their face, so they keep it fairly accessible," he said.

Carless said visiting comedians were all shocked by the fact that people had servants and drivers and nobody walks anywhere.

"A lot of comedians have huge laughs with the culture shock thing and being out here for the first time, with comments about being followed by about 500 guitar players on the street, to people selling taps on the overpass:'Taps, why?'"

He noted that since so many expatriates had been away from their respective homes for so long, if the humor was concentrated too much on individual characters, places and things, there was not going to be a reference point for the audience.

"We keep it fairly generic, a lot of jokes and scenarios I think translate. There's a lot of routines where you can just change the names and change the place, but a lot of characteristics stay the same."

As for local talent, Carless said the language barrier posed a challenge. However, an open mike spot, where members of the audience are given a chance to get up on stage and tell a few jokes was being considered.

"But we're probably more likely to do something about that if people come back to us and say they really want to do that rather than us trying to force it on the audience."

So what does Ian Carless get out of organizing the monthly meetings for the club?

"My personal reward out of this is seeing 300 people laughing their butts off."

And let's face it folks, in these times couldn't we all do with a good laugh.

Memberships for the Jakarta Comedy Club are available through its website www.jakartacomedyclub.com, or by calling 0811-854045.