What is the role of comedy at a time like this, in a world like ours?
To Vice Ganda, it is a refuge from the stresses of life.
“It’s a way to cope,” she says, like opening a valve on a pressure cooker.
Vice Ganda was first an idea, then a disguise, then a way to live, then a phenomenal superstar. Still unnamed, she was an alter ego to Jose Marie Borja Viceral, a boy known to his family and friends as Tutoy, who grew up in a brood of five on Tambunting Street in Sta Cruz, Manila, an area densely packed with informal settlements.
“I used to live under the Abad Santos station of the LRT [Light Rail Transit],” she says. “My family, we laughed together, we laughed a…
