Jimmy Yang - How to American

It was a particularly seedy dive bar in the south side of San Diego. All the patrons drove lifted pickup trucks, wore cargo shorts and drank Bud Light. When he told me the crowd was “a little rowdy,” what he actually meant was the crowd was a bunch of drunk racist assholes. I don’t like to toss around the word racist lightly, but in this instance it was quite justified. Before I went onstage that night, someone in the crowd booed another comedian and the rest of the crowd cheered. Then another drunk dude in the audience heckled, “You suck!” The comedian was flustered. Then another heckler randomly screamed out, “Nigger!” The heckle made no sense; the comedian was white. This piece of human trash just thought it was funny to scream out a nasty racial slur. What’s even worse was that the crowd loved it; they cheered in agreement. I thought to myself, Well, tonight is the night I die. I badly wanted that stage time, though. I was willing to dangle my little Asian body in front of a bunch of racist fools who looked like gator wranglers from the show Swamp People. I knew I had to do something different than my normal material to survive that night. So I decided to take a chance. Right before it was my turn to go onstage, I went over to the DJ, who was just some local drunk with an iPod, and I asked him to play a particular song when I got onstage. When the host brought me up—“Okay, give it up for our next comedian!”—the song came on:

“Everybody was kung-fu fighting! Those kicks were fast as lightning!”

The crowd busted out in laughter.

I jumped onto the stage and screamed into the microphone:

“What’s up, you racist motherfuckers!”

I was either going to win them over or get stabbed in the back of my neck. I might have pissed myself a little bit, but I didn’t let it show on my face. Then the whole place erupted into laughter. I got them by the balls and they paid attention to the rest of my set like a bunch of studious honor students. I doubled down on material about being Chinese. They loved it.

“I can’t go to Chinese restaurants with white people anymore,” I proclaimed in front of a room full of the whitest people. “Every time I go to a Chinese restaurant, my white friends always ask me, ‘Jimmy, you speak Mandarin? Bro, order in Mandarin, it’s going to be hilarious! They are going to hook us up!’” I stared at my imaginary white friend. “Bro, we are in Panda Express. Her name tag says Conseula.”

The crowd ate it up like it was orange chicken with a side of chow mein. I went on to have one of my best sets yet. I didn’t get paid a single penny that night, but I did score a six-pack of Bud Light. There were no rules in stand-up. It was the opposite of college; it was all the creative freedom I had ever wanted. I lived and breathed stand-up, and all I could think about was how to improve my bits. It made me forget I was a total disappointment to my dad. This was the burning passion that Mike Judge described in his commencement speech when he found animation. It was clear that I had finally found my calling in stand-up comedy.

TOP FIVE NONMONETARY PAYMENTS FOR A STAND-UP SET

1. Weed

2. High-fives

3. Unsolicited career advice

4. One food item from the left side of the menu

5. A used copy of FIFA 2013

I GOT ARSENIO CANCELED

Six years later, I made my stand-up debut on TV on the revival of The Arsenio Hall Show. Growing up on urban culture, performing in front of the Dog Pound on Arsenio was my equivalent of performing on Johnny Carson’s The Tonight Show. The guest performances were usually booked months in advance, but I got an urgent call from their booker on a Wednesday. “A comedian dropped out of Friday’s show, do you want to do it?” Abso-fucking-lutely. I had two days to prepare, and no time to overthink it.

I wanted to look fresh for my debut, so I went to Nordstrom with a five-hundred-dollar limit on my credit card. The show was going to send a limo to pick me up; I couldn’t just hop in with my Ross basketball shorts. I’d never bought anything at a Nordstrom before; I could barely afford Nordstrom Rack. I bought a two-hundred-dollar pair of jeans and a nice polo shirt at full retail price. My mother would have had a heart attack. “Jimmy! You spent two hundred dollars on those jeans?! Are you crazy?! I can buy you five pairs in China for ten dollars!” The old-country guilt still ran deep in my DNA, but I wanted to feel like an American baller for once in my life.

When the limo picked me up from my crummy apartment that Friday afternoon, my confused neighbors probably thought I was going to high school prom. I arrived at the studio and was ushered into my very own greenroom. I realized how far I’d come from folding envelopes in the back room of the Comedy Palace. The show had just started and I was scheduled to be the closing performance. Arsenio was doing his thing, riling up the Dog Pound with his opening monologue. His first guest was Tom Bergeron, the host of Dancing with the Stars and America’s Funniest Home Videos, who I grew up watching with my family back in Hong Kong. It was surreal to be watching the show on a TV backstage, knowing that I’d be teleported onto that television set in just a few minutes. I was a nervous wreck. I chugged as many free Fiji water bottles as I could in the greenroom, to make up for my two-hundred-dollar jeans. A production assistant knocked on the door. “You’re on in five minutes.” I took a much-needed pee and I walked backstage. It was surreal when Arsenio introduced me to the Dog Pound. “Give it up, for Jimmy O. Yang, ladies and gentlemen!” Wow, Arsenio Hall, the “urban” Johnny Carson, now knows my name. I walked out to an uproarious audience in the Dog Pound, and I was ready. All those hours studying BET Comicview were finally going to pay off; this was my Comicview moment.

I rolled off my set with my trusted self-deprecating opener: “I can’t take my shirt off at the beach. I’m in shape, but I’m just a small guy with really nice hair. So from the back I look like a hot Asian chick. And from the front… I look like a really hot Asian chick.”

The crowd applauded. I got them.

Then I went on with the bit about how I learned English from BET Rap City, the bit Sean Kelly encouraged me to write. The Dog Pound loved it. I felt confident, and pointed over to Arsenio and said, “Me and Arsenio, we are going to do Rush Hour 4.” Even Arsenio was clapping on the other side of the stage. I rolled on with the rest of my routine and stuck the landing with my Maury bit, where I observed that I’d never seen an Asian guy on the Maury Povich show, followed by an act-out of a fresh-off-the boat Asian guy on Maury. “Look, Maury, look. He has big eye and I have small eye. That’s not my baby, Maury!” To my absolute surprise, the audience stood up and gave me a standing ovation. All the time watching BET, all the time I spent at the Comedy Palace and all the crappy unpaid gigs I’d done had culminated in this moment on national television. “Give it up for him!” Arsenio hollered at the audience. He even did a callback on my joke. “Also check my website because Rush Hour 4 is coming, y’all!” He gave me a hug and whispered:

“You did it. You did it.”

Those three words meant everything to me. They validated my questionable decision to quit Smith Barney and pursue stand-up comedy. They validated the past six years spent at comedy clubs and dive bars. It was the first time someone had ever told me, “You did it.” I felt like I finally did something right with my life. I looked up at the audience one last time; tears welled up in my eyes.