Laughing Matters

Funny girl: Comedian Margaret Cho performing at the GLAAD Media Awards in 2005. Photo Kevin Winters/ Getty Images.

For North Americans of Asian descent, the opportunity to watch depictions of themselves on television and in film inspires equal measures of vindication and wincing dread. It’s great to see any Asians on screen, but when they do appear, it’s often in limited roles defined by Western clichés of Asian-ness. Which is why the 2004 film Harold and Kumar Go to White Castle was such a pleasant surprise.

A satire about two stoners, Harold and Kumar was the first mainstream Hollywood comedy to star Asian actors (Korean-born John Cho and Indian-American Kal Penn). It made deft jokes about racial stereotypes, neutralizing the heroes’ “otherness” by portraying many of the white characters — like a farcically racist cop or a sexually adventuresome hillbilly couple — as the weirdos. But Harold and Kumar was, first and foremost, a funny movie about pot smokers with the munchies. The most hilarious scenes — like the chronic-inspired montage in which Kumar dreams about marrying a walking bag of weed, or Neil Patrick Harris’s performance as an ecstasy-taking, sex-obsessed version of himself — had nothing to do with being Asian. The point was that while racism was a buzz-harsh for Harold and Kumar, it didn’t dominate their lives.

Harold and Kumar Go to White Castle highlighted the recent growth of Asian comedy in North America, which now includes pop-culture icon Margaret Cho as well as emerging stars like Mad TV’s Bobby Lee and Dat Phan, the first-season winner of the NBC reality show Last Comic Standing. With their increased visibility and a larger audience, Asian comedians seem to be working with more confidence, greater irreverence and a diminished need to justify their existence.

The concerns of Asian comedians parallel those of any artist working outside the mainstream: How do I define myself? Who is my audience? How much of my work should deal with my ethnicity — and at what point does it become ethno-pandering?

When you've got the munchies...: Actor John Cho as Harold in 2004 comedy Harold & Kumar Go to White Castle. Photo courtesy New Line Cinema.

For early Asian comedians, stereotypes were always an issue. Pat Morita — later known for his roles in Happy Days and the Karate Kid movies — performed stand-up in the 1960s under the billing “the Hip Nip.” Another early Asian comedian was Johnny Yune, who appeared in the film They Call Me Bruce. “[Yune] hosted a TV show in Seoul for many years,” recalls Tennessee-born comedian Henry Cho. “The audience thought he was pretty funny, but I did not. Saying ‘Herro’ instead of ‘Hello’ has never been funny to me.”

Among newer Asian comics, Cho, a Korean-American, is considered a groundbreaker, because his comedy doesn’t dwell on his ethnicity. “My act has always reflected my life: being single, being married, being married with kids. I always wanted to be a comedian first, not just an Asian comedian.”

Still, given the number of specialty nights devoted to Asian comedy, it’s profitable to exploit one’s ethnicity. “It’s easier for me to try to market through an Asian group,” admits Tina Kim, a fellow Korean-American stand-up. “But my comedy is for everyone,” she says, adding that “my favourite jokes are about internet perverts.”

Tetsuro Shigematsu, a Japanese-Canadian comedian, writer and CBC Radio host, has no problem being tagged an Asian comedian. “That’s what I am,” he explains. “Someone asked George Lopez why all his material was about being Mexican. He said, ‘Because my stories about being Jewish aren’t that funny.’”

Shigematsu’s early idols were black comedians like Eddie Murphy, Richard Pryor and Chris Rock. For Asian comics, the more established world of black comedy is a point of reference. Black comedians have emerged from a sizeable population with a longstanding, if troubled, presence in North America. Because of segregation laws in the U.S., early black comedians like Redd Foxx and Dick Gregory began by playing in front of exclusively black audiences, developing material and a style that reflected the audience’s experience. In the 1970s, Pryor became the first black comedian to bring his explicitly “urban” comedy to mainstream crowds, paving the way for comedians like Murphy, Rock and, more recently, Dave Chappelle. Even with this crossover, many black comedians continue to play to black audiences on shows like Live at the Apollo and in films like The Original Kings of Comedy.

Because there’s a much smaller Asian population in North America, Asian comedians have been more likely to play in front of a non-Asian audience, a crowd whose knowledge of the culture might not extend past stereotypes about MSG and karate. In the past, some Asian entertainers have resorted to packaging themselves, like some black performers before them, as a minstrel act — exploiting and reinforcing the hoariest Asian stereotypes to win laughs from non-Asian audiences. Shigematsu names Gedde Watanabe’s portrayal of Long Duk Dong in the 1984 film Sixteen Candles as one example of racial self-caricature. “Is there an Asian guy who grew up during the '80s that didn’t get called Long Duk Dong?” Shigematsu asks angrily, reciting the character’s famous line: “No more yankie my wankie.”

“No one loved the Donger more than white jocks. They laughed the hardest,” says Shigematsu. Some comics have suggested that American Idol reject William Hung may be this generation’s Donger.

When they do perform for an Asian audience, Asian joke-tellers have to contend with cultural and linguistic differences among their population. “I’ve done Asian gigs where I’ll talk about something specific in Japanese-American culture,” says Kevin Kataoka, a stand-up comedian who’s also written for Mad TV and Blind Date, “and get stares from any Asians who aren’t Japanese.”

Yet there is a shift afoot. All-comedy networks, Asian nights at comedy clubs and the increasing presence of Asians on television mean more opportunities for Asian comedians. Meanwhile, North America’s Asian population continues to expand. As a result, the material has evolved. On Mad TV, Bobby Lee touches on an esoteric Asian subculture by playing a hip-hop-spouting lunatic with a fetish for customized cars. The internet has also opened things up. The video-sharing site YouTube.com features a clip called Crazy Asian Mother by Erick Liang. In it, Liang — a 17-year-old from Livingston, New Jersey — does a studied, gender-switching portrayal of an Asian mother berating her son for a bad grade. “How you get B-plus in English?” says Liang, playing the mother, in broken English. “We come all the way from that far country, China, and we born you here in America. It’s unacceptable.” So far, the clip has been downloaded more than 1.3 million times.

Doing accents remains a touchy subject among Asian comedians. By putting one on, an Asian comedian might feel he’s being true to his experience or else subverting a stereotype. But there’s always the risk that it will confirm the prejudices of some audience members. For someone like Cho, who’s always strived to transcend stereotypes, an over-reliance on accents feels like a step backward. “Asian comics today,” he says, “seem to dwell too much on the broken-English thing and Chinese waiters.”

Bobby to the max: Comedian Bobby Lee, of MadTV fame, performing at the Comedy Store in Hollywood in 2003. Photo Carlo Allegri/Getty Images.

Some Asian comedians have followed the lead of comedians like Chappelle, exploiting and exaggerating stereotypes to call attention to racial double standards. In another Mad TV skit, Bobby Lee wraps himself in a kimono to send up the recent film Memoirs of a Geisha; the sketch conflates and ridicules the persistent retrograde characterizations of Asian women as hyper-feminine fetish objects and Asian men as submissive and emasculated.

Shigematsu mentions a skit he once did with his sketch-comedy group Hot Sauce Posse called Karajoke. In the skit, normal people do karaoke versions of famous comedy routines. Early on, a Japanese businessman recreates a well-known Eddie Murphy bit about kids “losing it” when they hear the ice-cream man. Karajoke builds to a racially explosive climax when an oblivious white man does Chris Rock’s indignant I Love Black People, but I Hate N------ routine. 

“We did it in a club during Black History Month,” says Shigematsu, “and we nearly got killed in the process.” By showing how, in a different context, socially conscious comedy can become horribly racist, the skit underscores the difficulty of talking about ethnicity.

In spite of great leaps in visibility, Asian comedy still has some catching up to do. “I can think of one sitcom that starred an Asian,” observes Kataoka, referring to Margaret Cho’s shortlived All-American Girl. “And I can think of three that starred a chimp. What comedy hasn’t seen yet is the Asian Chris Rock: a comedy Moses who is going to have a very universal appeal and lead Asians to the comedy promised land. It hasn’t happened yet.”

Kevin Chong is a Vancouver writer.

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