An evening with The Moustache Brothers.

The debate about whether tourists should come to Myanmar is resolved for at least one person. “Tourists keep us alive,” says Lu Maw, one-third of The Moustache Brothers, Myanmar’s most famous comedy/satire/folk opera troupe. He’s not being dramatic. In 1996, Lu Maw’s brother Par Par Lay and his cousin Lu Zaw were performing at a birthday party for Aung San Suu Kyi. Apparently, the regime didn’t find their political satire that night very amusing; when the two returned home to Mandalay they were promptly arrested. They were finally released in 2001, but the Moustache Brothers were blacklisted, banned from performing at any outside events. The brothers began putting on shows at their Mandalay home, and despite pressure and warnings from the government (or KGB, as Lu Maw calls them), they continue to do shows nightly for small crowds of travelers–the only audience for whom they can now perform.

Their show is a mixture of slapstick, cornball humor (including plenty of wife jokes), traditional dance, and political satire. The wiry Lu Maw crouches low over the microphone, delivering commentary loaded with rapid-fire idioms he picks up from dictionaries: his brother was “sent up the river,” he teases, “put in the clink,” “thrown in the Big House.”

It’s amazing to sit in a small room and see what amounts to as public a form of dissent against the government as you’re likely to see in this country, performed by people who were true political prisoners (Amnesty International campaigned for their release.) Lu Maw proudly points out that Aung San Suu Kyi herself sat in this very room as well; she came to see them perform upon their release from prison. As for fears of reprisals, or a return to prison, Lu Maw feels shielded by the attention he gets from tourists: “You are our eyes and ears.”