Edinburgh Fringe 2025
Slomosexual
Nebulous Niang
Genre: Comedy, LGBTQ+, One Person Show, Queer Comedy, Solo Show, Stand-Up
Venue: Little Cellar at Laughing Horse @ West Nic Records
Festival: Edinburgh Fringe
Low Down
The hilarious story of Nebulous Niang, a good Chinese Singaporean girl, following all society expected of her until she saw lesbian series Orange is the New Black.
Review
Slomosexual is a slickly performed, hour long solo stand-up show from Singaporean Chinese comedian Nebulous Niang. With the aid of occasional exhibits on a large TV screen, she tells us her life story focussing primarily on the expectations that Singaporean society puts on women (especially when she was growing up in 1990s Asia) of conforming to a hetero-normative life of getting a husband and having children, which is what she duly did. She shares childhood photos that show the writing was already on the wall early on that she was no girly-girl. She takes us through her childhood years (and is especially funny impersonating her no nonsense Chinese mother), and her early marriage to a sullen, brutish man, having children with him. She brings her life story up to date by sharing that she is now in an inter-ethnic lesbian couple relationship raising Gen Z kids in a conservative country, Singapore. But it is not these life story milestones that are the joy of this hour of engagingly honest, impish comedy storytelling. Nebulous Niang is a highly professional, competent and mischievous comedian and it is a delight to see a Chinese woman delivering quality queer comedy. She is continually wrong-footing us with the set-up and punchlines of her hilarious stories where she navigates her way out of a heterosexual straitjacket and into the free queer life she really wants to live. With no early lesbian role models and active discouragement of being anything other than a straight married woman, there are many very funny learning curves (not only Orange is the New Black) which she speedily ascends before, during and after her marriage. No spoilers here but some of the things she got away with in her marriage, with her husband’s consent or indifference are much more modern than the Singaporean society at the time would (or still does) tolerate. So in some ways, she wasn’t that much of a slow motion homosexual.
Slomosexual sold out multiple shows in Singapore, and it deserves to be more widely seen in Edinburgh. The hour flies by and you come out better educated about LGBTQ+ lives in Singapore and with a sense of relief that so many of the issues Nebulous Niang had to face were factors our parents’ generation faced in the UK, rather than current generations.
