The Revolutionary Rebrand of Asian American Comedy
Eversinceshe was a little kid, comedian Youngmi Mayer knew she was funny. As the “quintessential class clown,” she remembers not being able to sit still but always being able to make people laugh.
As an adult, Mayer began to wonder whether she could turn her sense of humor into something bigger. “I just did not think that I had the right to tell anybody that I had dreams of pursuing something like comedy or writing, ” Mayer, 39, says. “Because I thought that that was reserved for people who were just way better than me.”
Mayer — who was born and raised in South Korea and later moved to Saipan, one of the Northern Mariana Islands — had long thought comedy was a luxurious and indulgent pursuit, a feeling she largely attributed to both being Asian and being a woman. She described not feeling worthy of that type of fulfillment and happiness — that is, until, at 33, she told her therapist that she wanted to pursue comedy. The very next day, Mayer signed up for an open mic at a dingy bar in New York City’s East Village.
As she worked on her craft, that feeling of inadequacy crept back up. But Mayer kept reminding herself that regardless of which field we choose, imposter syndrome is a reality for many of us. So she leaned into the emotion — and found that the audience laughed with her, not at her.
Today, she speaks through the lens of her identity: as a woman, as a Korean, as a biracial person, as someone who immigrated to America when she was 20 and realized that life wasn’t all like ”Saved By The Bell,” and as the author of her upcoming memoir,“I’m Laughing Because I’m Crying.”
Mayer’s approach to comedy is a refreshing, triumphant example of how comedy made by and about Asian people has evolved. In 2005, the year she moved to America, comedy was a space barren of the Asian diaspora, aside from a few famed comedians like Russell Peters, Margaret Cho and Ken Jeong.
It was also a time when stand-up from Asian Americans was designed to be palatable to white audiences at the expense of those in the community. Sometimes, this was more obvious, like when it manifested in reductive mockery of our accents, our -isms and our identities.
At the end of the day, it didn’t matter whether you, as an audience member, were Asian or not. You were going to laugh with everyone else at every crude accent, every comment about brown girls’ hairy arms, and every joke about ever-disappointed parents and about not getting into Harvard — all of which came from both people who looked like us and people who didn’t. (Whitepeoplewerereallyonone.)
Asian people in the West were typecast as “forever foreigners” and members of a model minority, because America’s white gaze didn’t have tolerance for nuance.
Raj Belani, 38, a comedian who also works in T.V. production, believes that that era of comedy was a matter of circumstance and not individual willpower, which ultimately led Asian comedians to where they are today. “We’re better than [those stereotypes],” he says. “But at the time, I think they needed to do what they had to do to open that door for comics today. It’s a double-edged sword.”
The white gaze in comedy was first disrupted by Black comedians such as Richard Pryor and Eddie Murphy in the 70s and 80s. “Black people and culture did this first. Audiences essentially were given permission to laugh,” says comedian Kareem Rahma, 39. “And I think that’s what’s happening now, with the rest of us.”
Rahma was born in Cairo, Egypt and moved to America when he was 6. Though he doesn’t identify as Asian himself, his Arab upbringing means that he resonates with facets of the Asian experience as a brown person himself. You might have seen him asking for strangers’ out-of-pocket takes on the New York City subway, or asking taxi cab drivers to take him to their favorite spots while they keep the meter running. More recently, he hosted one of six shows put on by Asian Comedy Fest, a NYC-based festival amplifying diverse comedians who are of Asian and Pacific Islander heritage.
Asian Comedy Fest’s existence is the product of the change that’s come since the Somebody-Gonna-Get-A-Hurt-Real-Bad era. Spaces for Asian comedians to connect with audiences with similar backgrounds (and those who just get it) began cropping up, while social media democratized comedy and began connecting the right audiences to the right comedians. Harmful tropes around perceived Asianness ceased becoming the punchlines to jokes. Rather, the Asian experience, whatever that looks like to comedians, has become something to punch up, to pepper into more nuanced material, more incisive jokes and reclaimed stereotypes — and something that puts online and offline audiences in stitches.
Mayer, who also performed at this year’s festival, has subverted many tropes and stereotypes around the model minority myth by finding humor in it. “Asian American creatives and comedians are forced into this very rigid box of saying exactly what people want us to say,” she says. “In that rigidity, there’s so much freedom because I can be like, ‘Oh, you thought I was going to say this? I’m not.’ I think for me, it’s one of the places where I find a lot of joy because it’s just so ridiculous.”
Finding hilarity in these tropes is something that has bonded Asian diasporic cultures, across languages, customs, and circumstance: Mayer, for instance, finds that delivering some of her jokes in Korean both enhances the storytelling and delights a spectrum of audiences. But these comedians aren’t just making fun of white people; they’re redefining who’s the “other,” which is revolutionary on its own.
To be clear, there are still many comedians today who rely on those tired tropes — about small penises, about being nerds, about not liking math. On one hand, comedian Alex Kim, one-half of the Boba Gays duo, thinks relying on these stereotypes in sets makes for uninventive hack jokes, and they stick out to him even more as someone who came to the U.S. for college after living in Abu Dhabi for most of his childhood and adolescence. “Unless you’re making an actual commentary on it, or you’re actually trying to expand the joke, you’re just regurgitating an old joke,” Kim, 29, says.
On the other hand, he can see how this stereotype-heavy comedy is rooted in insecurity, and how those comedians may feel that they need to address their Asianness on stage. (Though maybe it’s the Virgo empath in him.)
Kim himself feels a similar pressure around being a gay man. “I always have to address it somehow, you know? I have to come out every set just because, in order to get the jokes I need to tell,” he says. “It’s something I haven’t even done with my parents.”
The sensation Kim describes conjures the gravitas of a single person being vulnerable to an audience of fleeting strangers who dole their laughter, recognition, and validation to a select few. But like Mayer, Kim tries to subvert and reclaim all of those misconceptions.
“Even though I’m given the parameters of a performance, the fact that I’m able to take full control of it has enabled me to be more comfortable in coming out to people and being casual about it,” he says.
Belani, too, is trying to subvert those same tropes. The comedian spent the first half of his career performing in Lancaster, Pennsylvania, which has a tiny Asian population. “In Lancaster, the kind of comedy that I would kind of tend to focus on was more dumbed down comedy for the general audience — so nothing super specific about my culture or growing up Indian,” he says.
But in these settings, the shock factor of the punchline is where his most revolutionary work occurs. “One thing I try to do is to spread progressiveness with my comedy, but in a way that sounds ‘backwards’ up top.” Belani explains. “And then when they hear the punchline, people are like, ‘Whoa, where did that come from?’”
His set at the comedy festival did exactly that, throwing his audience for a loop while still delighting them, and finding nuance and normalcy in topics such as queerness and divorce that have traditionally been swept under the rug in many Asian households.
Nonetheless, there’s a common thread in my conversations with Mayer, Belani, Rahma and Kim. Sharing their lived experiences with their audiences and calling them their own is actually where a lot of genuine connection happens. “I am living an Asian queer life. Yet the more specific I get, the more universal I connect with people,” Kim says.
And inversely, as more and more comedians do the same, Asian American comics may feel less pressure to focus so intensely on their identities on stage. “It doesn’t have to be specifically in those stories about that identity. The fact that I’m talking — that a gay Korean is talking — and just the fact that I’m saying it, already makes it” about identity, Kim says.
It’s when lived experiences become broad generalizations that we fill gaps with disingenuous tropes and lose sight of each other’s humanity. “Our brains are made to find patterns, and that’s how we understand the world,” Mayer says. “And then once you get that, that’s the reality in your head. It’s when we subvert those ideas that a lot of beautiful art and creativity lies, but it’s also what a lot of people hate and are afraid of.”
Comedians — then and now — have always been expert observers, and comedy as an art form has its roots in responses to political and social events. We saw it in the way that Hari Kondabolu developed the incredible documentary ”The Problem with Apu” (and how ”The Simpsons” took the bait). We’re seeing it in the way so many comedians of Asian descent have used their shows to fund humanitarian efforts in Gaza.
Comedy has always been a vehicle for social change and activism, and those who perform it are acutely aware of their place in the world.
“I want people to feel seen, but at the same time, I want to feel seen,” Mayer says of her comedy. “And that alone is so rewarding.”
