For the world – at least the world that Filipinos live in – is mad, not in the American sense that It’s a Mad, Mad, Mad, Mad World nor in the African sense that The Gods Must Be Crazy nor in the Latin American magic/magical/ marvelous realist sense, but in a distinctively Filipino, laugh-while-your-house-is-burning sense, the only sense that has made Filipinos treat a coup d’état as a revolution and a fiesta at the same time, enjoying junk food while kicking out an acknowledged dictator or a perceived degenerate, later forgiving and forgetting all personal and political hurts, grinning while posing for photos with record-breaking thieves and erstwhile objects of collective hatred, lying down and enjoying being literally or figuratively raped and boasting about it.

You cannot get any weirder than in the Philippines, and RJ Ledesma knows it. Using the oldest trick in the literary book, which is to create a character who is a character, he has raised his nanny (called a yaya in the Philippines, with a complete subculture built on the name, including a language codified by professional linguists as ‘Yaya English’) to the level of an icon.

There is no end to writers that attempt to write comedy. Many comics are funny, but few are hilarious. Ledesma is well, hilarious. What makes him even more hilarious than most writers of comedy is that he finds even things familiar to us funny… from the conventional rituals of getting married to going on a foreign trip to realizing that one is balding. That is the secret of his humor: he makes his fellowmen laugh at themselves. His ribbing is never not in jest, but where there is comic smoke, there is bound to be tragic truth.

Taken from the book’s Foreword
by Dr. Isagani Cruz
Columnist, Philippine Star