Our main project has me thinking a lot about how I can incorporate the idea of ‘home’ into an understandable, cohesive form by this quarter’s end. At first I was clueless – maybe I’d do something about Pokemon? Cartoons?? All of it seemed like trying too hard. In the end it was Chico who made me realize the opportunity that lay in the world of comedy.

There’s a few things to note about comedy.

• It’s subjective – that is, not everyone will think everything is funny.
• It’s largely dominated by men as an industry, like nearly all fields.
• It’s about forming a connection with the audience. Whether that connection is a personal one, a deep one, even a meaningfully shallow one. Without connection, there can be no comedy.

“Home” to me revolves around the idea of being appreciated, and that marries nicely with the act of telling funny stories, cracking jokes or using silly voices ( like we’ve been talking about – comedy.) I don’t need to be making people laugh to feel appreciated, but it’s hard not to feel wanted when they do.

So moving on, we have the idea of stand up comedians. Off the top of my head, the only Asian American comedians who have achieved significant success I can think of are Margaret Cho, Aziz Ansari, Mindy Kaling and Ken Jeong. That’s pretty pathetic, I must say. Regardless, we have to start somewhere.

Let’s start with Margaret, a comedian who I’ve admired since high school.

• Margaret basis a large part of her act around her family, in particular her mother. In this example, we see that her impression of her mother is central to the humor of the situation. A lot of us can relate to having an embarrassing mother, but Margaret being Korean American adds another level of intersectionality to her act. On one level, it can seem almost offensive. After all, for a good chunk of American history, Asian Americans suffered tremendously at the hands of white folks monetizing mimicry of Asian speech and appearance. (Consider Mickey Rooney in Breakfast at Tiffanys. We learned a bit in A Short History about how only Asians of a certain ‘caliber’ were allowed into the country, and this reputation was almost immediately used against them.)
• But the fact that Margaret is Korean American creates a new narrative – she infamously played Kim Jung Il on 30 Rock, and again, it would have been another Ghost In The Shell situation had she been anything but Korean. It changes the nature of the connection.
• In my own life, my stand up act relies only occasionally on my identity as a biracial person. Sure, plenty of it is based on my status as a woman, but my race isn’t as significant as it is with Margaret’s act. The idea of creating representation, of using what was once insulting in a way that rewrites the story, is very much part of why comedy is home to me. That’s what I want to learn more about, as well as how comedy and humor in Asian communities has evolved in our own country and abroad.