I'm thinking of doing more social commentary material

Between 2012 to 2015, I was pretty experimental with my comedy, in the sense that I was some days political, some days personal, some days I was ranty, and some days, I was self-deprecating. You can do that as an open micer because you're only doing 5 minutes of material at a time and you basically could be anything you wanted to be on any given day. It was liberating and I miss those days. Towards 2015, when the country was under Najib Razak and there was that big 1MDB scandal, I felt compelled to talk more about that, at first just personally with friends, and then I started doing it on social media, and then it found its way into my comedy. By the middle of 2015, I think all my sets were political in nature. And then one day, this girl named Sharanya saw me at a mic and said she loved it and said she wanted to bring her mom to watch me, and asked when I was performing next. I said tomorrow, at the Crackhouse. Then later, after she had left, my friends told me she was Datuk Ambiga's daughter. Datuk Ambiga was the founding chairperson of Bersih, the movement to clean up our fucked up election process (dead people voting, gerrymandering, lots of dodgy stuff going on). The following night, Datuk Ambiga came to the crackhouse mic. It was a great show. I'm not sure if that had anything to do with what happened next, but I was invited by a friend Masjaliza to perform at the Bersih 4 rally that year. It was an awesome experience.

At time went by, all the other comedians started doing jokes about Najib's 2.6 billion bucks and Arab donors, so I started doing less and less of the political commentary material. It wasn't so much a conscious decision to stop, but in hindsight, I think there were several reasons for it. The first one was I did worry about being persecuted. At the time, between 2015 and 2018, right up until the 14th general election, the government was slowly clamping down on information and communication among the people. I voiced out against it, but at the same time, I also worried for myself and my family. I was worried we were fighting a losing battle. Another reason was, creatively, I feel like I was not growing. I kept making jokes about this guy is stupid, that guy said something stupid, and look at this other guy, what an idiot, but the jokes all basically followed the same formula. To be honest, I feel like there's a lot of that going on in America right now as well and I can see why the people on the right hate the people on the left. Nobody is really suggesting any solutions and everyone's just calling everyone else stupid. I wish I could do something a little more zoomed out, a little less partisan and maybe more social, like what George Carlin used to do, but I didn't know how.

Lately though, I have one or two ideas. I'm not sure if I have enough, but a few weeks ago, I was performing at The Joke Factory and Sharanya was at the show and I felt a bit sheepish and almost guilty doing all my silly self-deprecating personal jokes in front of her. I'm proud of those jokes, but I also felt like I needed to explain to her why I'm so different from the last time she saw me, but in the end, I didn't. And maybe this is that guilt talking, but I do feel like maybe I want to include back some social commentary in my comedy.