Life, through Reggie’s eyes

Story & Picture By TAN LEE KUEN
Illustrations by REGGIE LEE
THERE is one Reggie Lee cartoon that stands out in my mind.

It’s the one with a bunch of Elvis impersonators in an elevator, crowding around a cowering priest. One Elvis says to the holy man, “Holy Father, relax! We’re only attending the ‘Elvis’ convention.” There is a newspaper headline incorporated into the cartoon which says, “Pope tells man not to play God” and the story is on genetic engineering.

Okay, so it isn’t funny, when you recall it like this; the humour just doesn’t translate. That’s why we have cartoons and cartoonists like Reggie Lee. So when the time comes to meet the man for an interview, you expect Mr Funny himself, a regular joke-per-minute kind of guy.

However, one has to bear in mind that cartoonists have a reputation for not being funny at all in person, sort of like clowns. Reggie admits to being like that.

“People think that cartoonists are real jokers. At school functions, they ask me to do stand-up comedy, but I can’t. I’m bad at remembering jokes,” says the 47-year-old Penangite when we meet at his semi-detached house for the interview.

Reggie is a bit flustered; another guest had arrived at the same time as I did, and I wonder if it’s another interviewer. Turns out the man is on an errand to pick up a copy of Reggie’s work for the Petronas Twin Towers opening. In his finest hour yet, Reggie drew the Malaysian icons that were projected onto the towers upon their unveiling.

Reggie ushers us into his house, which is neat but haphazardly furnished. Art hangs from the wall and china curios clutter the shelves. A piano stands against the wall.

Reggie has problems burning the presentation into a CD and he’s not willing to part with the only copy he has. There’s a bit of a fuss, and Cheryl – Reggie’s 17-year-old daughter – is called downstairs to help sort things out. She’s nonchalant but not unfriendly. She takes the CDs up to her room, and there’s a bit of a wait.

No luck.

Reggie starts apologising to the gentleman, promising to send it over to his office when it is ready.

He settles down and the interview begins.

For those not in the know, Reggie Lee is the other famous Malaysian cartoonist. Perhaps he is not as famous as Lat, but the man is recognised in his own right. Reggie is the creator of Ah Lok Kafe – a spoof of the Hard Rock Café lifestyle – which “houses the whole of Malaysia, where you can get all the races in one place.”

He is also the man behind the cartoons in the Microsoft website, msn.com.my, The Sun, and before that, The Malay Mail.

Reggie’s cartoons are sly takes on the social and political situations we read about every day. He goes through the newspapers daily, and when something catches his eye, thought bubbles form over his head and a new cartoon idea is born. Reggie sees the humour in the ordinary.

“I’m not into slapstick,” he explains as he leans back against the green sofa decorated with pastel cushions.

“I deal with serious affairs, but I see the lighter side of it. I’m a dead serious person, but I have a funny way of thinking. It’s lateral thinking. There are some sensitive issues I won’t touch on, like race and religion, but I hantam the Chinaman, because the Chinese don’t care what other people say about them.”

Reggie’s cartoons are syndicated in the United States, and his work has appeared in newspapers as far-flung as Brazil. He has three compiled volumes of work: Made in Malaysia: Reggie Lee, and Good Morning, Malaysia. He’s also the artist behind the local Monopoly board game.

He deals unabashedly with stereotypes, lampooning with tender loving care terribly Malaysian idiosyncrasies – the Chinaman with the permed hair, the skinny Indian laden with gold, and the Mat Rock with tight pants are instantly recognisable Reggie characters. As a cartoonist, Reggie believes he is selling fun to make people laugh. Because of this he suffers from the cartoonist anxiety of not being funny enough.

“You are your own worst critic,” he says.

He is inspired from watching the world go by, observing human nature and eavesdropping on the next table, “But I’m not a KPC (kay poh chee: Hokkien for busybody), ok?”

The idea for Ah Lok Kafe came to Reggie when he was alone on a beach armed with pen and paper. The characters just flowed out of him. Now those two-dimensional characters are turning reel-life with the help of flesh-and-blood actors.

An eponymous live-action movie based on his cartoon is in the works. Currently in post-production, the movie is expected to be released in February.

“I guess this is the country’s first English comedy movie. At first we wanted well-spoken English but as they went along, Manglish started creeping in. So we thought, why not? We use what comes naturally,” says Reggie with a little shrug.

For Reggie, this is a dream come true. Reggie himself drafted the basic idea of the story for the movie, while his friend Caroline Ho fleshed out the script. The movie was shot in Malacca and Kuala Lumpur in seven days, under a tight budget of RM500,000, a paltry sum for a full-length feature. Directed by Anwardi Jamil (who previously directed Tuah), it features big local names like Leonard Tan, Ida Nerina, Reshmonu, Man Bai and Kee Thuan Chye. It also stars Reggie’s children, Cheryl, 17 and Shawn, 12.

Anwardi’s been following Reggie’s cartoons for some time, and his first intention was to do an animated feature, “but that would have been too costly,” he says. “It was fun, working with a fellow cartoonist,” he continues, referring to his own short stint as the creator of the Some People series for the New Straits Times back in the 1970s.

The movie has two main threads: One concerns Mr Char Kuay Teow’s son, Fatt Chai, who has won a Liverpool FC scholarship but needs another £50,000 (roughly RM320,000) to secure his place. So the Ah Lok gang holds a karaoke competition, and, many incidents later, manage to raise the money. The other is about an unscrupulous developer who wants to buy out Ah Lok Kafe.

Nothing profound here, but it will be a distinctively Malaysian experience.

“It’s a feel good movie,” says Reggie.

There is also an album in the wings – Ah Lok Kafe, The Album, with original songs from the movie. Reggie turned songwriter for one of the tracks, a reggae tune called Reggie’s Reggae.

“It’s a song that talks about our multi-culturism and world peace,” he explains. The rest of the album is a mixture of rock and roll, reggae, a cappella and dondang sayang. Most of it has tongue-in-cheek lyrics like, See the Chinaman, see how he dance, it can make your hair stand.

The movie is expected to spin off a TV series, scheduled to begin screening in March next year. Naturally, there will be comparisons with the other coffee place sitcom.

“Kopitiam is Kopitiam, Ah Lok Kafe is Ah Lok Kafe. They are totally different,” sighs Reggie.

After we had talked a bit, daughter Cheryl comes bounding down the stairs. The CD is ready, and she places it on the dining table, breezily saying to Reggie, “You owe me RM25 for this.”

The daughter-father relationship, I learnt, is a casual one, owing to Reggie’s frequent absence when she was very young. She was one of the reasons he quit advertising. One day he had looked at her and wondered, “What happened to my baby girl? She’s all grown up now.” Coincidentally, the day after he packed it in, his son learnt to cycle on his own, and Reggie was around to give him a pat on the back.

Reggie dismisses her joke, and asks her to fix us a drink. She comes back with Coke and a glass of red wine.

I wonder out loud if a drink for Daddy usually includes alcohol. “I’m not alcoholic,” retorts Reggie. “I don’t drink a lot these days, maybe one or two glasses of wine. It’s to relax.”

By the cartoonist’s own admission, the young Reggie Lee was an imp, a scallywag who wasn’t interested in studies or books. “My four other brothers were academics, and I was the naughty one,” he says.

Born Lee Sin Kong, he earned himself the name Reggie for his antics in school. Reggie is the self-absorbed prankster in the Archie comics. He says there’s a little bit of him in all his cartoons, hence that element of impishness.

After secondary school, he went on to start, and never finish, language, architecture and art classes. His attention span was short and Reggie had no great ambition in life. By chance, he did a short stint with an advertising company and found that he liked it. He did well in the fast-paced advertising world, despite his claims to being the best lepaker in Malaysia.

Reggie won several industry awards for his work, including the prestigious Max Lewis Award for an anti-nuclear campaign, an international Clio award for Tuborg beer, and two local Kancil awards.

Linus Teoh, a 30-year-old art director remembers that as a kid he had asked his father to take him to Reggie Lee for an autograph. “I liked his cartoons. They were a good alternative to Lat because he had a distinctive style.”

The irony of it was Teoh later worked under Reggie in the same advertising firm. That was when Teoh discovered how straightforward Reggie could be.

“The first thing he told me when I met him was if my aunt was so-and-so, and that she had scratched his car, his first BMW,” relates Teoh. And working under him was no walk in the park either.

“To Reggie’s way of thinking, you have to suffer first before you can see the rewards. One thing I learnt from him is that you don’t judge a man by his gut. He can drink, even though he’s not a big man.”

Reggie maintains that cartooning was, and still is, a hobby for him. It was by chance that Reggie got a job with Gila-Gila magazine, despite his poor Bahasa. He ran a kung fu series with them for seven years. That cartoon character got him noticed, and he was soon commissioned to do cartoons for The Malay Mail, called Reggie’s Eyes. He used to draw his cartoons over lunchtime, and submit them to the newspaper after work.

After 20 years in the industry, he decided to call it quits and concentrate on doing cartoons. It raised eyebrows. “You tell people that you’re a cartoonist, and the first thing they ask you is: Can make money-ah?” says Reggie.

Reggie took a year off to clear his head. Then he set up Real Colours with a partner to introduce a range of merchandise based on his cartoon characters, such as T-shirts, postcards, mugs and watches.

Income-wise, the merchandising puts meat on the table, but Reggie is not sure he’s entirely comfortable with being the boss of the company.

“I’m in management, which I’m not very happy with. Do you know how difficult it is to manage people? It is not Reggie Lee,” he laments. These days, Reggie is also devoting more time to God, going to church every Sunday. “I was brought up in St Xavier’s (in Penang). It was a missionary school and they had prayers all the time,” he says.

We step out of the house to take some pictures. Reggie is helpful, offering a few possible angles and positions. We settle for a shoot with a fat, fluffy hamster sleeping in its cage.

Reggie takes the little creature out and tickles it, saying, “This hamster is quite fierce. He’s already killed two female hamsters that we put in his cage.”

I take a picture of Reggie with the hamster of terror, wondering if it gets terrorised in turn by the two dogs currently locked up behind the house.

All through our interview, Reggie is true to his word. He doesn’t crack a single joke, in fact, he does not respond to any of my attempts. I realise that cartoons rely on intellectual thought, like the stand-up comedian relies on timing. For Reggie, his humour expresses itself in dry comments. In the midst of our conversation, he suddenly quips, “You’re not from Penang?”

I shake my head no.

He says almost pityingly, “Unfortunately.”

I wondered if he was joking then. W