There's A Lot More To Annette Lee Than Comedy

Annette Lee may be best known for her spoofs of locals and Singapore culture, but there’s a lot more to her than comedy.

- Adora Wong

“Sorry, wait ah,” says Annette Lee as she pauses to chew a mouthful of boba from her bubble tea. Not that one would expect her to have her priorities in any other order – she did, after all, write and perform a song about the well-loved beverage for The Ann & Ben Show, the YouTube comedy series she recently started with musician Benjamin Kheng. The duo even made a music video for it.

An actress, singer-songwriter and Youtube personality, the 29-year-old first gained a following after playing multiple comedic characters on the social media website SGAG. But since leaving the company last year, Annette now works independently to write, direct and act in skits and shows for her own platforms, a lot of which are still related to comedy. Another song she released together with Benjamin recently is “a song about the mixed emotions one feels when ordering mixed rice [cai fan]”. It racked up close to 900,000 views in just two months, so it’s probably safe to say that she’s doing just fine.

But there’s a lot more to Annette than being funny. For one, she’s persevering – it’d be naive to think that her 100,000-strong following on Instagram and 160,000-strong following on Tiktok came without grit. She’s also deliberate – a lot more thought goes into her work than you might realize. And she’s really “not too similar” to the characters she acts as, even the more popular ones like Sue-Ann and Chantelle.