Vice Ganda, the comedian all three rival Philippine networks now want at once

Vice Ganda

Photo: Patrickroque01 / CC BY-SA 4.0, via Wikimedia Commons

Born	March 31, 1976 Tondo, Manila, Philippines
Occupation	Comedian, television host and actor
Awards	Asian Academy Creative · FAMAS · Metro Manila Film Festival · PMPC Star · GMMSF Box-Office Entertainment Awards, Bert Marcelo Achievement

On Sunday nights Vice Ganda’s talk show goes out on GMA, the channel that spent most of her career as the enemy. At noon, six days a week, she runs It’s Showtime on that same network while still under contract to ABS-CBN, the rival that made her famous. She has also signed with MediaQuest, the group that owns the third network in the fight, whose chairman Manuel V. Pangilinan handed her a title no one in Philippine television had carried before: Queen of All Networks. The comedian who built a career on saying the cruel thing first is now the one performer the three rivals agree to share.

The other turn is quieter, and stranger. For more than a decade her films were mostly Christmas comedies built for the Metro Manila Film Festival, loud and profitable and waved away by critics. Then the director Jun Robles Lana cast her as a breadwinner coming home to a family that lives off her wages, and later as a queer parent fighting to keep an adopted son, and the industry began handing her acting prizes.

The child the family called Tutoy, legally Jose Marie Borja Viceral, arrived in Tondo, Manila, on March 31, 1976, the youngest of six, and grew up on Tambunting Street in Santa Cruz. On Palm Sunday 1991 her father, Reynaldo Viceral, a barangay captain in Tondo, was shot dead in front of the family; her mother, Rosario Borja, left to work abroad as a caregiver. School was paid for by a donor in Kyoto, Noriko Tokura, who received a letter from the child every week for years. Viceral studied political science at Far Eastern University and left without finishing.

The education that counted happened at night, in the comedy bars of Malate. At Punchline and The Library, the owner Andrew de Real gave her the stage name and a slot, and the format was the one she still uses: improvised attack, with the front rows as raw material. In 2002 she tried the other side of the noontime screen as a contestant in the singing segments of Eat Bulaga!, the country’s longest-running noontime show. Bit parts followed while the bar shows paid the rent.

The break came in October 2009, when ABS-CBN needed a judge for a new talent contest called It’s Showtime after the comedian Long Mejia turned the seat down. The judge’s chair became a host’s desk. A first lead role arrived with Petrang Kabayo in 2010, a remake of a Roderick Paulate comedy, and in 2011 The Unkabogable Praybeyt Benjamin, directed by Wenn V. Deramas, became the first local film to reach ₱300 million in ticket sales. That same year she launched Gandang Gabi, Vice!, a Sunday talk show that ran until March 2020.

What followed was close to an annual ritual. Sisterakas was the biggest Filipino film of 2012, and Girl, Boy, Bakla, Tomboy, with Vice Ganda in four roles, earned her a film-press actor of the year award. From 2014 to 2017 every film she headlined, Beauty and the Bestie and The Super Parental Guardians with Coco Martin among them, topped the year’s local box office; Gandarrapiddo: The Revenger Squad broke the record of ₱526 million that Beauty and the Bestie had set. The streak ended in 2019, when The Mall, the Merrier finished behind Miracle in Cell No. 7. In 2021 the game show Everybody, Sing! made her the first Filipino named best entertainment host at the Asian Academy Creative Awards.

The comedy has always carried a bill. During a 2013 concert at the Araneta Coliseum she told a gang-rape joke about the GMA news anchor Jessica Soho; the women’s group GABRIELA condemned it, and after first defending it as the humour of the comedy bars, Vice Ganda apologised on air. Nora Aunor once withdrew as a judge of a Tawag ng Tanghalan final rather than share a stage with that brand of insult. Academic studies in the Philippines have traced how her sarcasm shapes the way young Filipinos joke, at times at their elders’ expense. The pattern has not ended. In February 2026 she apologised for comparing game-segment boxes to bombs, and in July for a remark about a Baby Dolls dancer that viewers called colourist, after which the MTRCB, the national review board, called in the show’s producers. Her defenders hear a queer kid from Tondo talking back; her critics hear a star with a noontime microphone punching down. The record supports both.

The pivot came through Lana. And the Breadwinner Is…, the top grosser of the 2024 festival, cast her as Bambi, an overseas worker who comes home to a family that depends on her money, and it won her the FAMAS Award for best actor in 2025. Call Me Mother followed that December, with Vice Ganda as Twinkle, a queer parent raising an adopted son, and Nadine Lustre as the biological mother who returns to claim him. It won her the festival’s best actor prize and grossed ₱392 million worldwide by February 2026. The Asian Academy Creative Awards have since named her the Philippine national winner for best actor in a leading role; the regional result will be announced in Singapore on December 3.

Television has moved just as fast. ABS-CBN, without a free-to-air channel since 2020, now places its programmes on its old rival GMA, which is how It’s Showtime airs there Monday to Saturday. In August 2026 Vice Ganda renewed with ABS-CBN and, on August 12, signed a two-year creative partnership with MediaQuest, the parent company of TV5, at the Meralco Center in Pasig. On September 13 Gandang Gabi, Vice! returned to Sunday nights on GMA after six years away, with an uncut companion version streaming on iWant. In May she had already said the next film would be a comedy.

Vice Ganda identifies as non-binary and has said on It’s Showtime that being called he or she are both fine. Since 2018 she has been with Ion Perez, a member of the show’s cast; the couple held a commitment ceremony in Las Vegas in October 2021. She has campaigned for the SOGIE Equality Bill, a proposed anti-discrimination law for LGBTQ Filipinos.

The comedy she promised opens on December 25. The Greatest Showdown, one of the first four official entries of the 52nd Metro Manila Film Festival, reunites her with Lana on a script by Jumbo Albano and casts her as Queenie opposite Vic Sotto as Kingston, two arch-enemies forced to work together. It is their first film as a pair. Sotto is one of the founding hosts of Eat Bulaga!, the noontime show It’s Showtime has fought for viewers since 2009, and the same stage where a young Viceral once lined up to sing.