Esther Ku is a stand-up comedian on NBC’s Last Comic Standing, and I’ve been trying to wrap my head around why exactly her act is so spectacularly unfunny. (Gentle Reader, you may take my word for it, but it’s best if you make up your own mind and watch her act on YouTube yourself.)
Look: I think we should be supportive of having more Asians on television (or anywhere in the public sphere, really), but it doesn’t mean we should give mediocrity a free pass.
For instance, Elyse Chin writes in a short article on Ku called “Funny Asian”, right here in AsianWeek:
“Irreverent and not afraid to poke fun of sensitive subjects like accents and telling one Asian apart from another, the divide between Asian Americans and Asians is refreshing and not-so-mysteriously offensive, as her childlike approach to the jokes renders them insightful without any malicious subtext.”
I think there’s something missing in the sentence above (the “divide” is “refreshing” and “offensive”?), but Chin understands what Ku is doing. The deliberately atrocious Valley Girl accent, the constant uptalk, maybe even the pigtails: all shorthand meant to connote, one supposes, a general bubbleheadedness. I get what Ku’s doing, too, but just because the jokes are from the mouth of a ditz doesn’t mean they’re actually funny. (Actually, her quips about Asian guys provoked a weak laugh from an Xbox addict like myself.)
When Chin writes that Ku’s schtick is “to playfully undermine Korean stereotypes”, it’s not immediately clear how these stereotypes are exactly “undermined” by her performance. The trouble is, she traffics in the most exhausted and obvious stereotypes, in chopsticks and slant eyes. That is, it’s not the kind of humor that comes from acute observation, or a comedy animated by outrage, but a stand-up routine that’s little more than a superficial enumeration of cliches, strung together without rhythm. Which does not comedy make.
I’ll leave aside for the moment any discussion of judge Richard Belzer’s approving comment about Ku’s humor: “It’s legal for an ethnic group to make fun of themselves,” he said, also a riposte to Heath Hyche’s yellowface bit. (Surely Belzer, one of my favorite actors on the greatest television show of the ’90s, Homicide: Life on the Street, would know better than to talk about “legality”.)
But perhaps I’ll save, for you readers in the comments below, the question of whether or not it’s “self-hating” or “racist”. Part of a racial project, sure, but is it really racist? Would I be a little more forgiving if Ku were performing in front of an all-Asian audience, one that would at least recognize the whitewashed-and-dumb-Asian-chick persona better? Would I be more inclined to call it racist if she weren’t attractive and/or Asian herself? And would I be less disturbed if the audience didn’t sound like they were totally eating it all up?
In the end, it’s part of a long tradition of satire that took a wrong turn somewhere, like this. Of course, the readers of The New Yorker very likely got the joke — it’s obviously meant to illustrate the absurdity of such beliefs — but it’s not that funny considering there are people out there who really do believe Obama is a Muslim. There’s a similarly scary chunk of the American public who think all Asians look alike as well, and that’s no laughing matter either.