say much while everybody
was talking but you’d throw
something out there that
would blow everybody
away,” so I had that. As far
as performing, not really,
that just kind of happened.
https://youtu.be/37pUloMa3PM
Q: Had you thought
about it even before that
week, that you wanted to
be a comic or actor?
A: Yeah, acting is why the
whole standup career started. At that time, Billy Crystal and Steve Martin had just made the move
from doing standup to acting, so I thought I’d
give it a shot. Instead of going to New York
and being a starving waiter, I thought, “Why
not do standup?” And my buddy’s going,
“You’re out of your mind.” But I wanted to give
it a shot.
Q: You’re Southern, and you play that angle so well in your act. It makes me think
about Southern greats like Jerry Clower,
storytellers with a lot of good jokes sewn
into stories about living. If you’d been
born in the north, if you hadn’t been able
to play people’s expectations because of
your race against what they actually got,
do you think you’d have still been performing?
A: If I’d been born and raised in San Francisco,
where there are tons of Asian people, probably not. I would’ve had a west coast accent
and there’s a hundred thousand Asian people
there with that. Being the only Asian family in
Knoxville definitely set us apart. Even if I tried
it nowadays it’d be shocking to people. There
wasn’t another Asian person in my school
from kindergarten until I was a senior in high
school. Finally in my senior year, Vietnamese
refugees came to my high school, and they
were like… I was walking down the hall with
my girlfriend, a blonde cheerleader, and they
walked up and went, “How’d you do that?”
And I’m like, “What?” They pointed to her, and
I told them I played ball. We didn’t even know
it was weird to have a Southern accent until we were in college. Freshman year on the
first day, these girls thought I was mocking
my buddies. I told them, “What’re you talking about, I always talk like this.” And they
couldn’t believe it.
Q: You’re a clean comic, too. You’re well
established now, but was that something
that made it harder to get yourself out
there in the early part of your career?
A: Yeah, it was an anomaly and I still am. I’m
a Christian, so I didn’t do a lot of cussing off
stage, so I