"Better a fallen rocket than never a burst of light."
~ Tom Stoppard, The Invention of Love

Saturday, July 11, 2020

Ronny Chieng: Asian Comedian Destroys America! (2019)


With all my news satire shows on hiatus this week, it’s time for a standup special. As I’ve said before, I’ve really come to enjoy Ronny as a Daily Show, and his performance as Eddie Cheng in Crazy Rich Asians only cemented that. This is the first time I’ve seen him do standup, and I got a kick out of it.

Ronny’s brand of withering rage from The Daily Show is definitely present here, that exasperated sense of “God, these people!” It gets directed at a wide variety of topics, from consumerism to individual liberties to white people calling the cops on Black people for innocuous things to planning three weddings for him and his wife. He also gives his pitch for why America needs an Asian president.

The style is a little rougher than his humor on The Daily Show, but for the most part, I liked it a lot. I enjoy his views on America as someone who didn’t grow up here, the land where we’re all “making it rain” with the “50 napkins” you get with every takeout meal. Along with that, he marvels at America’s notion of “everyone can make a difference” extending to stuff like one person holding up an entire subway train based purely on their belief that it will wait for them. I also love his comment that, in Chinese, the name for America means “beautiful country” while the name for China means “middle country” – “‘Middle country’?! That means nothing! […] We named this place better than we named our own shit!”

There’s a great bit comparing different state mottoes, based on the premise that east-coast states have intense mottoes rooted in the American Revolution and mottoes get more relaxed the further west you go. He wonders just how far people in New Hampshire go to abide by “Live Free or Die,” and the plot twist of the Texas state motto is terrific. (Like the audience, my guesses were wrong – “Really, you’re gonna let the fucking foreigner teach you about your own country??”)

Another part I really like is his weary resentment for his wife’s friends asking him about being a standup comedian. The device of using his flapping hand to represent the other person talking is nothing revolutionary, of course, but I love the way he uses it to have them eat his face while they talk, all while he slowly dies inside. It’s a perfect representation for the feeling of being trapped in a conversation you hate that you’ve had a million times.

But everything comes to a head in the big finish, the tale of the three weddings. Naturally, Ronny has no patience for their white friends’ dietary restrictions (“spreadsheets of genetic failures!!”), and the dramatic saga of him trying to get from New York to Melbourne for the first wedding is hilarious. In addition to the overall wildness of the story, he neatly weaves in references to number of bits from earlier in the show, which really brings things home at the end.

Warnings

Lots of swearing, references to violence (including parents beating children,) sexual references, and thematic elements.

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