After months of writing and shooting for www.gua.com.my, our producers are beginning to take over our reins and gradually manoeuvring our bandwagon towards pop culture, for the sake of ratings. Its easy to understand pop culture; its anything that makes money.

In comedy, pranks, spoofs, impersonations and sitcoms now pave the way. Stand up comedy, although not very well-received or understood amongst the older generation, is getting more popular with ever-increasing stand-up impersonators, imitators, and wannabes taking opportunity on audiences' shallow knowledge on comedy.

Jokes and one-liners, what used to go stale quickly and not reused back in the pre-Internet and pop media days, are now hard to come by with myriad comedians recycling them so much so that audiences are confused of who and where 'the originals' were. The Internet and YouTube these days only made things worse by helping the more popular comedians get instant recognition for their work without us even asking the question, "Hey, is that material really his/hers? I received that from an SMS before..."

In an era when comedians are taken more seriously and our politicians are taken as a joke, quality comedy is going extinct with pop culture on top of the entertainment food chain.

Take the music industry for instance. Songs used to make us cry. Rappers used to have roots. Singers used to have voices. Lyrics were written as if a writer's heart and soul melted and froze into long lines of melodic words. Thanks to pop culture, the music industry has lost its rhythm and is hijacked by those who do no justice to the industry's history and meaning. Songs are now less memorable even though popular music stations play them more frequently. Popularity of songs are now not judged by voice and sound quality but by effeminate-looking males and Barbie-bodied bimbos. And comedy seems to be heading this way... except, maybe, the last sentence.

But there is something about originality and its all about taking risks. Now, everything and everyone are so blinded by $, they would rather stick with those that can promise $ even though they have the resources to buy the world several times over. Unfortunately, risks is something to risky to buy, it seems. Perhaps they have forgotten that what is now considered popular were once original before.

Save Malaysian comedy. Save Malaysian polit ... I mean, comedians.

-chi ho-