As I struggle to pin the gloriously frustrating realities of Indonesia to the page, friends ask: wouldn’t it be easier to write the book as fiction? But as I look at the headlines that are churned out day after day: women must ride side-saddle on motorbikes, MPs will spend over half a million dollars travelling to Europe to check out witchcraft regulations, I think: “Fiction? You couldn’t make this up.”

Indeed when the witchcraft trip hit the headlines, I commented to a friend that Indonesia didn’t need to start a satirical magazine like The Onion; we could just mash together a random selection of real headlines and it would read just like satire. I think it is one of the reasons that slapstick always outguns satire or irony on the battlefield of Indonesian humour: it’s just too hard to tell the difference between reality and satire.

Check out this “news” story about Aceh banning immodest farts and ask yourself: is it any sillier than many of the other stories we see in Kompas?