Hossan Leong: Singapore’s latter-day court jester

Though it’s hard to believe, there are some places in Singapore where people openly mock their rulers, who retain strict controls over the media and have shown a tendency to use the libel law against those who do them down.



On Saturday, I watched Singaporean comic Hossan Leong gently poking fun at Minister Mentor Lee Kuan Yew and his family and briefly mocking the government’s economic and racial policies and the failure to prevent terrorist Mas Selamat from escaping last year.

In the West, such ribbing would be considered tame in the extreme. But in Singapore, this was pushing the boundaries of political humour about as far as they can go or at least as far as most people are willing to push them.

The vast majority of Hossan Leong’s performance, which was set up as a spoof chat show, was decidedly non-political. But, still, he was only allowed to get away with breaking such taboos because of two reasons:

1. He was performing in a theatre – While the government censors take a very strict view of what can be shown/written about in the mass media, they are much more relaxed about a medium that plays to a limited and largely elite audience. Only 615 people can fit in to the National Library Drama Centre, where Leong’s show was playing, so at best fewer than 10,000 will be get to see it during this ten-day run. More importantly, most theatre-goers come from the upper echelons of the middle class and the government is more relaxed about allowing this narrow elite a bit more personal freedom.

2. The political humour was interspersed by copious amounts of cross-dressing, stupid songs and all-round pantomime silliness. Thus any hard message behind the political humour was diluted and deliberately deprived of any semblance of legitimacy.

To put it another way, Leong is adopting the role played by court jesters in England during the Middle Ages.

While the people were forbidden from speaking ill of the monarchy – sometimes on pain of death – the jesters were allowed free reign to mock and parody because it was accepted that anything they said was “in jest” and that they were merely the court fool.

The man who called Lee Kuan Yew a dictator to his face

William Safire, the former speech writer for Richard Nixon and New York Times columnist who died on Sunday aged 79, was known as a pugnacious commentator.

There are perhaps few better examples of this than his interview with Lee Kuan Yew, Singapore's founding father, at the World Economic Forum in 1999, when he called Lee a dictator and accused him of showing disregard for the principles of liberal democracy.

In Safire's word's: "The determinedly irreplaceable Lee Kuan Yew is the world's most intelligent, and to some most likable despot."

Lee's response to the accusation of dictatorship was "do I need to be a dictator when I can win, hands down?".

Safire's New York Times piece on the interview is online here, while a full transcript of the interview has been posted here.

There are some real gems in here, such as when Safire asks whether Lee's son (Lee Hsien Loong) would be deputy prime minister [as he was in 1999] if it wasn't for the familial connection. [Lee junior was sworn in as Singapore's third PM in 2004.]

Lee responds: "If he were not my son, he would be the Prime Minister. I'll tell you honestly, I stopped him, because he can run faster than any of the others. But I told him it would do him no good. Just stay out of this race. And his generation, his peers, know that I am not boasting when I tell you this."

Then, Safire asks whether Lee forsees a dynasty. Lee replies:

"I am not that bereft of satisfaction with my life that I need to live vicariously through him. In fact, if he doesn't measure up, it is better that he does not show up, because he'll just besmirch the family reputation."

Lee also talks in the interview of the need to restrict the flow of online content to the "lumpen mass" of 30%-40% of Singaporeans who are not well-educated. [Just 15% of Singaporeans were using the internet back in 1999, compared to 76% today.]

"We don't want this barrage day after day ... the society has got to adjust and evolve step by step."

Hat-tip to Reme Ahmad, assistant foreign editor at the Straits Times, and his personal blog.

Photo courtesy of Flickr user No Use For a Name.

Singaporean businesses "spunking in the face of recession"

The National Day Rally speech by the Prime Minister is one of the most important set-pieces in the Singaporean political calendar.

So there must be red faces this morning on the sub-editing benches at the Straits Times, the government-owned daily newspaper, after someone penned the following headline for a story based on PM Lee Hsien Loong's comments about how resilient Singapore's small-and-medium-sized businesses are:

"SMEs show spunk in the face of recession"

That's enough lowering of the tone for one day...