Show me only the funny

SINGAPORE - Chua Enlai emerges from the men's room and skitters across the lobby of the Grand Hyatt hotel, wiping his palms vigorously on his jeans.

"I'm so sorry, my hands are wet," he exclaims as he shakes hands with his two minders (one is an understudy) and the photographer, his face creased into an apologetic grin.

There is a disarming earnestness to the 35-year-old actor, whose exuberant man-child persona often rises to the surface over the course of this interview at the hotel's Mezza9 bar.

"I may not even read this interview because I get so uncomfortable reading anything about me," he presses his palms to his cheeks, "I just find it weird. Not so much being afraid of what I've said, but... it's just strange.

"Maybe I should get a couple of martinis, loosen myself up a bit," the bachelor says with a thunderous guffaw, which turns heads around the room.

One of his publicists, from artist management agency Fly Entertainment, looks nervous. "Are you sure?" she asks, glancing at the waitress, "it doesn't have to be too strong..."

He orders one anyway - a vodka martini with a twist. When it arrives, he whips out his iPhone for a photograph. For his Instagram page? He nods sheepishly. He has more than 19,000 followers on the photo-sharing social network and nearly 16,000 on Twitter.

Chua has made a name for himself with deeply likeable comic performances, and is perhaps most recognisable as an eccentric array of characters on the hit news parody TV show The Noose, whose seventh season premieres on April 1 on Channel 5. "April Fools' Day! If you believe us," he says, giggling.

Some of his most popular roles include B.B. See, a deadpan newscaster with a thick British accent, and Thai correspondent Pornsak Sukhumvit, who has a penchant for pole dancing. The role of Pornsak won Chua his second Best Comedy Performance award at the 18th Asian Television Awards in December last year.

Chua has brought his larger-than-life brand of comedy to the stage as well. He is a mainstay in theatre company Wild Rice's annual pantomimes, including Aladdin (2004) and Cinderel-lah! (2003, 2010), and was a key part of the group's all-male and critically acclaimed The Importance Of Being Ernest (2009) by Oscar Wilde, which travels to Macau in May.

He also pops up in the ever-popular musicals about national service: restagings of Michael Chiang's Army Daze and an upcoming musical adaptation of Jack Neo's Ah Boys To Men, also next month.

But for all his on-stage pizzazz, Chua is also unabashedly forward about his insecurities.

He pulls out his iPhone to show this reporter a video of his "absolute rubbish" dance rehearsal for Singapore Day, which he will host in London on March 29.

As the familiar cha-cha rhythms of the musical Beauty World begin to play, he declares: "The funniest part is the part when I got really lost."

As far as I can tell, he is executing every move perfectly, lingering only for a moment to take note of a step. He jabs at the screen: "It's just copying! There! See! Lost, lost lost!"

He leans back, satisfied. What he doesn't tell you is that he has been watching this video to do better.

Beneath the easy wisecracks and off-the-cuff jokes is an incredibly hardworking actor who cut his teeth on gritty, serious and disturbingly dark roles when he first broke out on the theatre scene in the early 2000s.

In Toy Factory Productions' provocative Shopping & F***ing (2001), he played a 14-year-old rent boy slaked in the grease of a corrupt, consumerist world. In Bent (2003), he played one of an ensemble of homosexual characters persecuted by the Nazis during World War II.

Both plays won big at the Life! Theatre Awards, and he earned a Best Actor win for Shopping & F***ing at the age of 23.

Both these plays were also directed by Beatrice Chia-Richmond, 39, Chua's longtime friend and artistic collaborator, who raves about his work ethic: "The moment Enlai steps into the rehearsal room, he's 1,000 per cent on."

She adds, of Shopping & F***ing: "I asked the actors to go out on the streets to seedy places, to walk around and 'pimp' themselves out. And he would do it, coming back with stories I knew only an actor who's put himself out there and taken risks would have done."

Actress-director Michelle Chong, 36, his popular compatriot on The Noose, credits him as being "very dependable" and "so talented". She had cast him in her first movie as director, Already Famous (2011), as a Filipino salesman: "When he comes on set, he's very prepared. He designed all these little actions and he knew Filipinos pointed with their mouths and things like that, so he really would do all his research before coming on set."

Chua does seem to have a knack for a wide array of accents, whether Filipino, Thai or British.

His own is erratic, straddling the extremes of thick Singlish and a more nasal American twang equally comfortably, with a hint of New Zealand thrown in.

He moved to New Zealand when he was about seven, after his horse trainer dad got a job there. His mum is a housewife. The only child grew up on a stud farm where horses were bred. Lowering his voice to a muscly baritone, he wryly interjects: "That's why I'm such a stud."

He grins, pleased with the punchline.

Chua spent 12 years in New Zealand. He says he did not find moving there very disruptive: "I think at that age you're a lot more flexible, more open to changes."

Performing was something that came to him naturally. His mother sent him for speech and drama classes and he would perform on stage in school, including a turn as the villainous Bill Sykes in Oliver Twist.

The question of identity, however, has penetrated much deeper.

He admits: "Sometimes I feel that I can't relate to a lot of people from either country. It's kind of - it's quite unsettling up till today, actually.

"Like during Chinese New Year or going to the temple for prayers or habits in a market and stuff like that - I do feel like a fish out of water sometimes."

He now lives here with his family in a house in the East Coast.

As a Singapore citizen, he always knew that he would have to come back at some point to do national service. In fact, he interrupted an architecture degree at the University of Auckland to return.

He says: "Sometimes you can't quite imagine yourself doing that (architecture) for the rest of your life and you want to do something else. My parents were a bit like, 'Are you mad?' - but it had to be done. It took them a few years to figure it out, but they respected my decision. Not so Korean drama lah."

Back in Singapore, he had no idea what his army mates were saying for several months; neither did they understand his thick New Zealand accent.

"Physically, it wasn't that demanding," he says, "But psychologically, I think it was."

He adds: "You grow up in a fairly egalitarian society and then suddenly you go into the army. There's this whole Asian culture of respect according to age and seniority which I wasn't very used to. But funnily enough, it's still there in me somewhere. It comes back to you somehow."

He joined the Music and Drama Company, the birthplace of many a Singaporean actor, and scored a part in TheatreWorks' 24-hour festival, Got To Go, in 1998.

It was at this festival that he met Goh Boon Teck, artistic director of Toy Factory, as well as Chia-Richmond. He was roped into Shopping & F***ing, the start of a theatre career marked by edgy roles in challenging productions.

He was part of the abstract Plunge (2001), directed by the late theatre luminary Krishen Jit. It explored socio-political situations in Indonesia during the 1998 Asian economic crisis.

In The Necessary Stage's Fundamentally Happy (2006), which won Production of the Year at the 2007 Life! Theatre Awards, he scored a Best Actor nomination for playing a man who had been molested by his neighbour as a child.

With shows like these under his belt, he admits to worrying that he has been typecast in comedic roles over the past few years. Sounding wistful, he says: "Now it's like everything I do is comedy - it's not that I don't enjoy it, but yeah, it's happening with a lot more frequency.

"People who don't go to the theatre, they say, eh, when are you going to do a serious role? And I go, what do you mean? I've done serious roles before, okay? And as the years go by, I never get asked for any serious dramas for TV."

What about Point Of Entry, that immigration action drama on Channel 5?

"That would be Porn Of Entry," he laughs, splicing his much-loved character of Pornsak into the show's title. "Pornsak becomes police. They went to Bangkok many times to film mah. Porn On Entry!"

He shifts gears, backpedals: "In my professional life, there have been so many random things, so many things that seemed to happen by chance - that sometimes I feel, maybe I should not try to dictate what I want to do because so many good things have happened by the way."

One of these good things was The Noose. The show has maintained more than 700,000 viewers every season and Chua is still pleasantly surprised by its success seven years on.

He says: "It was quite guerilla, it was kind of like the Sunday night 10pm show, and we thought no one would watch it."

The show spoofs local news programmes with a host of zany reporters and presenters, as well as fictional news reports that echo real-life current affairs.

He says of the show: "It's so with the times. We say things that people won't dare to say on a public platform."

The Noose has parodied everything from the furore around a maid carrying an NS man's backpack to a dig at the reportedly high salaries of Singapore politicians through the character Wan Mo Peh, a vague political figure that Chua plays.

He has also taken up roles in other sitcoms, including My Sassy Neighbour, and hosted a slew of variety shows in English and Mandarin, and for children.

But with this level of fame comes a great deal of public attention and Chua admits to craving privacy now and then.

Singaporeans are generally polite and respectful, he says, but there are certain moments he would rather avoid.

"You know, you're flying off on a plane, and you're hoping, oh God, I hope the person next to me is not Singaporean," he says, eyes widening, citing an instance where a fellow passenger refused to stop talking to him.

He adds: "What's really scary is when people go, hey, can you tell me a joke? Can you pole dance for me, please? Like in 7-Eleven or at the petrol station."

As we speak, two men have recognised Chua and are staring intently at his back, trying to make eye contact with the TV star. He smiles and waves at them and they walk away, seemingly satisfied.

Even at about 15 years into this profession, Chua still seems to be coming to grips with his ability to move audiences - which he does on a regular basis.

He recalls his appearance in Dream Academy's stand-up comedy show, Happy Ever Laughter (2012), where he did a segment involving a hilarious Hokkien spoof of New Zealand's haka chant. He mock-wails: "Stand-up is the most lonely thing. You just feel so insecure because there's only you. Your relationship with 2,000 people all depends on you."

He adds: "Am I comfortable or am I regurgitating the script? I don't know! Because I'm not playing a character or am I playing Enlai as a character? Or what? I don't get it! It's a crisis, sometimes."

This, despite the fact that he had the Esplanade Theatre howling with laughter night after night.

He ponders his chosen profession, almost as if he is reassuring himself that he has done the right thing.

After a pause, he adds: "There's something about it, about trying to prove to myself that I can do this or that I can do this new thing. You know?"

"I'm not very competitive, but sometimes I do things just to - I don't know what it's like, but I just do it to prove to myself that I can do it."

And perhaps the only person left to convince is himself - because he's got the audience thoroughly impressed.

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