Kemal Palevi is one of the most in-demand comedians in Indonesia at the moment. Having rose to prominence through stand-up comedy, Kemal’s comedy style may be considered too edgy by some uptight conservatives, but just about everybody would agree that he went too far to get a laugh recently.
Kemal has an ongoing Youtube series called #isengnyaKemal (Kemal’s pranks), in which he asks random things to random people in public. Some of them are pretty harmless, like the time when he adopted three different personas in order to score girls’ phone numbers…
… learned Japanese phrases to get a Japanese girlfriend in Tokyo:
….or tried to score pecks on the cheek from random girls:
But netizens were outraged by the latest #isengnyaKemal video (which has been taken down following the outrage). In it, Kemal reportedly pretended to be a medical student who was writing a thesis about Indonesian women’s busts, so he went around asking random women their bra sizes.
What really irked netizens, however, was that one of the girls he asked was only 14-years-old. One netizen even started a petition on Change.org to have Kemal take down the video, which he eventually did.
Kemal yesterday apologized through a series of tweets, but he apparently didn’t know about age of consent:
When I mas making the video, none of these girls got angry, and when they found out they were going onto Youtube, they all laughed.
But I was dumb, if they’re not 17, they don’t have the right to decide, there must be parental consent. I missed that part.
Maybe if I was slapped, I’d stop, I wouldn’t dare. But everybody was happy [at the time]. I had little knowledge about this stuff.
In fact, Kemal didn’t deny that he knew the girl was 14 before he asked her about her bra size, and this screenshot of the video’s thumbnail from his Instagram further confirms that, as its caption reads: “Kemal is even more out of control, he asks the bra sizes of many girls!!! He even asked [the bra size of] a 14-year-old girl.”
This isn’t the first time that Kemal has been inappropriate towards a minor in a Youtube video. Although nobody else has pointed it out yet (and we only just noticed it today), in this video he knowingly tries to sell pornographic DVDs to a 16-year-old girl, during which time the writing #Kemalpedopil (Kemal is a pedophile) pops up, yet he continues his pitch to the girl anyway (go to 02:00).
While we believe that comedians can and should be able to skirt the ever so subjective line of appropriateness, Kemal definitely went too far in this case. His videos clearly show instances of him knowingly sexually harassing minors, and there’s absolutely nothing funny about that.
