Most comedy shows want you quiet, with your phone on silent. Fat Kids Are Harder To Kidnap® wants you yelling numbers at the stage before a countdown clock swallows the sketches nobody picked.
Singapore theatre company How Drama brings its topical comedy back for two weekends from 16 October 2026 at the Ngee Ann Kongsi Theatre, Wild Rice @ Funan. The deal is gloriously chaotic: 31 short plays in 60 minutes, performed in whatever order the crowd demands, from a script that isn’t finished yet. How Drama bills it as Singapore’s longest-running topical comedy. It has been roasting headlines since 2008, so it has had plenty of practice keeping up with the news.
31 Numbers on a Washing Line
The setup is wonderfully low-tech. The numbers 1 to 31 hang across the stage like laundry on a line. Every audience member gets a programme listing all 31 plays, and when a sketch wraps, the actors shout “Next!” while the room hollers back the number it wants to see.
A countdown clock runs for the whole hour. Beat it and you get through every play on the list. Run out of time and the leftover sketches are lost forever, the kind of pressure that can turn a polite theatre crowd kiasu (Singlish for a fear of losing out) in no time.
How Drama’s house rule is blunt: shouting is required.
Think of it as TikTok’s For You Page with a live cast and the audience controlling the swipe. When lockdowns pushed stand-up comedian Jacky Ng to perform online in 2020, he told DANAMIC it was “very hard to grasp the timing when there is no laughter to space your jokes out.” Fat Kids flips that problem on its head by giving the timing to the room, whose yells set the running order.
A Script That Isn’t Finished
Writers Jay and Melissa Sim are working on the 2026 material right up to opening night, and the cast devises sketches alongside them. That tight deadline is the selling point. Whatever the country is arguing about the week the show opens is fair game.
The hit list so far reads like a year of group chats. It covers the Roxy Square wanton mee drama, the World Cup’s biggest moments, the long-awaited BTS comeback, Singapore’s programmes to raise its fertility rate, and those cute viral monkeys and raccoons. (For overseas readers: Roxy Square is a mall in the eastern neighbourhood of Katong, and wanton mee is springy egg noodles with dumplings, sold at hawker centres, Singapore’s open-air food courts.) Treat the list as a starter menu, though. Anything that breaks before the last show can still be tossed into the pot.
The fertility-rate material is the one to circle. Few topics follow Singaporeans in their late 20s home to family dinners like the dreaded “So when are you having kids?”, and that awkwardness is prime roasting territory. BTS and the World Cup give K-pop stans and football fans an easy way in. The Roxy Square saga, meanwhile, is a strictly local affair that will land hardest with anyone who has ever queued for their favourite noodle stall.
Community Clubs to the Kennedy Center
How Drama was founded in 2007 to make interactive, site-specific, and immersive theatre, so a show run by the audience sits squarely in its wheelhouse. Fat Kids followed in 2008. Since then it has taken aim at everything from ministerial gaffes and geopolitical blunders to whichever TikTok craze was trending at the time.
The show travels well, too. It has played community clubs and schools across Singapore as happily as festival stages abroad, from the Kennedy Center and the Singapore Embassy in Washington DC to Paris Fringe and DC Fringe. It was nominated for Best in Theatre at the Sydney Fringe Festival in 2019, then again at the Melbourne Fringe Festival in 2020.
Topical comedy on a Singapore stage takes careful footwork. When Kumar returned with Kumar Uncut in 2024, DANAMIC asked how she keeps her trademark boldness while minding the sensitivities of such a diverse audience. Fat Kids has been doing this for 18 years. That’s an impressive run in a genre where punchlines go stale as soon as the headlines move on.
Five Performers, Nowhere to Hide
Keeping an hour of audience-directed comedy afloat against a countdown takes seasoned performers, and this year’s ensemble fits the bill. Ross Nasir, How Drama’s co-artistic director, brings more than 20 years of stage work. She has toured Fat Kids to fringe festivals in Melbourne, Sydney, Paris, Washington DC, and Oslo, and her credits include the one-person musical Big Brown Girl, which Esplanade commissioned and which later played the WestK Cabaret Festival in Hong Kong.
Jo Tan is an award-winning actor and writer whose work has won accolades in Singapore, the UK, and Australia. She trained at the famed clown school École Philippe Gaulier and is forever looking for people to play with. In a show where the audience acts as a sixth cast member, that clown-school training is the ensemble’s secret weapon.
Fahim Murshed is an actor, theatre maker, and rapper. Malaysian artist Jun Vinh Teoh has screen credits that include the Singaporean comedy-adventure film We Can Save The World. Both list Secondary: The Musical among their recent stage work.
Rounding out the five is newcomer Yeo Zhiyi, who graduated from the School of the Arts Singapore as a theatre major in 2014. Fat Kids marks her professional stage debut. Picking a show with no fixed running order for a first professional gig takes nerve, which makes her the name to watch this October.
Pick Your Night Wisely
Performances run from 16 to 18 October and 23 to 25 October. There’s a 7.30pm show on all six dates, plus 3pm matinees on both Saturdays and both Sundays. Every ticket costs S$35, excluding booking fee, so there are no seat tiers to agonise over.
The smart pick is an evening show on the second weekend. How Drama promises to work in whatever breaks before the final curtain, so those later nights get an extra week of news to raid.
The show is in English. Visitors from overseas will have no trouble with BTS or the World Cup, but a quick scroll through Singapore’s recent headlines before curtain-up will help the local jokes land. Funan is a short walk from City Hall Mass Rapid Transit (MRT) station, which makes the Friday-night dash from the office painless.
🗓️ Date: Friday to Sunday, 16 to 18 October and 23 to 25 October 2026
⏰ Time: 7.30pm on all six dates, plus 3pm matinees on 17, 18, 24, and 25 October
📍 Location: Ngee Ann Kongsi Theatre, Wild Rice @ Funan
🎟️ Tickets: S$35 (excluding booking fee) on BookMyShow
🗣️ Language: English
⏱️ Format: 31 short plays, one countdown clock, and an audience that picks the order
Tickets for Fat Kids Are Harder To Kidnap 2026 are on sale now through BookMyShow. Set a reminder for the second weekend from 23 October, bring your loudest friend, and warm up those vocal cords, because once that clock starts ticking, it won’t wait for anyone’s number.
Visuals courtesy of How Drama.
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