A comedian has defended her controversial joke over the missing plane MH370, despite receiving backlash.
Jocelyn Chia’s stand-up sketch over the missing Malaysian flight caused outrage last year. She was performing at a New York club when she referenced the disappearance of Flight MH370.
The plane was making a journey from Kuala Lumpur, Malaysia to Beijing, China, in March 2014 when it disappeared. It vanished from air traffic control radars while 227 passengers and 12 crew members were on board. Present day, the March 8, 2014, flight is still one of the biggest mysteries in aviation.
Due to the sensitivity over the missing flight, some social media users felt Chia’s joke went too far.
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The Singaporean, who lives in the US, joked during her sketch that Malaysians hadn’t visited Singapore in a while because their “airplanes cannot fly”.
Chia added: “What, Malaysian Airlines going missing not funny, huh?
“Some jokes don’t land.”
The comic faced backlash from users online but also from authorities, with Malaysian police reaching out to Interpol to investigate her under the country’s laws on insulting speech. Chia called the move “ridiculous”.
Singapore’s foreign minister, Vivian Balakrishnan, said they were “appalled by her horrendous statements”. They said they were “sorry for the offense and hurt caused to all Malaysians”.
The comedian has come back to defend her joke, comparing it to other comics who use references to 9/11 for their shows.
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She told The Mirror: “I think a lot of the Malaysian and Singaporean critics were initially biased by the comments they read about the joke before watching it. The reason why the joke works incredibly well in a live show is because I have the element of surprise on my side.”
Chia said she had been performing the sketch for 18 months before it went viral and received backlash. She has attested she continues to say it during shows “because it was one of my best jokes”.
She added Malaysians trying to cancel her made the comic more determined “to do it every single night”.
Although going viral meant she received a ‘boost’ to her career, with extra gigs in more cities and countries, she won’t be performing in the country again.
“They accuse me of crossing the line and being heartless and insensitive; being a bad comedian or an amateur. The latter makes me laugh because it takes a certain level of skill to pull off a joke like the one I did,” Chia said.
“As the saying goes, ‘tragedy + time = comedy’. Jokes about tragedy are not uncommon in comedy.”
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