Stand-up comedian Butch Bradley comes to Singapore
By Foo Rong En
Entering a club at 8pm seems rather surreal, with a disconcerting feeling that one came in at the wrong time. Hours before ladies night on Wednesday, the crowd at Mink was cheerful and slight raucous, where several comedians took to the stage to tickle the crowd. The mood was relaxed and casual, with an air of joviality that must have arose from both the jokes and the accompanying booze.
The headliner act that day was Butch Bradley, a well known comedian who have appeared on ‘The Late Night Show with David Ferguson’ and was the featured comedian at the HBO Comedy Festival. Despite woefully proclaiming jet lag, he delivered the punch lines with ease and had an amazing chemistry with the audience. Good-natured jibes were made at the audience but there was a thin line as one wonders whether he is laughing with them or at them. Sexual innuendos and racist stereotypes were thrown out to the audience and given the ‘Butch’ treatment, which invoked many roars of laughter. The white guy with a handful of pretty ladies was accused of kidnapping them, exploiting the common stereotype of sarong party girls.The French psychology student was not spared either and was asked to diagnose the reasons behind the audience’s reactions.
The audience was targeted mercilessly. The roving photographer with the Joker shirt was labelled as ‘the creepy guy who takes pictures of you and never reveals them’, while the unfortunate woman who was sitting right in front of the stage that appeared to be spacing out for a moment was accused to doing Harry Potter spells to keep herself in a protective bubble. Chanting words in an exaggerated whisper with his face in a solemn mask, he mimicked the action of practicing witchcraft while the woman shook her head violently in a silence protest against the accusations.
