How to American Read online

  I approached one of the managers at the Comedy Palace about my dire financial situation, hoping he’d give me a raise from seven fifty to eight dollars an hour. “Jimmy, you’re great, but there are plenty of desperate comedians out there who would kill for minimum wage,” he frankly explained to me. And he was right. I had zero leverage on asking for a fifty-cent raise. He advised, “Why don’t you ask around for a second job? All the comedians here have day jobs.” “I don’t know, I don’t think anybody wants to hire me,” my low self-esteem responded. “Dude, everyone loves you here, just ask the next person who comes in the door.” And just like a trite sitcom plot, the door swung open and Jay, a middle-aged comedian, entered. I turned to him.

  “Jay, where do you work?”

  “I sell used cars.”

  “Can I get a job with you?”

  “Yeah, sure, come down to the lot, I’ll get you a job.”

  And that’s how I became a comedian/used-car salesman. Apparently, you need zero qualifications to become a used-car salesman, just like becoming a stand-up comedian.

  The dealership was a crummy used-car lot that specialized in selling shitty old cars to people with bad credit. Our customers’ credit scores were so bad, when no other car lot in the city would sell them a tricycle, we’d jump in to sell them a 1998 Dodge Neon at a 24 percent interest rate. It doesn’t take a master salesman when you’re people’s last resort. Our slogan was “Either you buy our shitty car or you can take the bus.”

  The car lot manager, Larry, was a sixty-year-old veteran car salesman and a career alcoholic. He would vanish from the lot for days at a time to go on a binge. Then he would make a miraculous comeback from the dead and push ten Dodge Neons in a week. I never judged Larry based on his addiction, and I looked up to him as a top-notch car pusher. I learned a lot of old-school salesmanship from Larry and soon became the young hotshot at the shittiest used-car lot in town. It might not have been Smith Barney, but I felt like a baller who could afford HomeTown Buffet once a week. I knew if I worked hard, someday, just maybe, I’d be able to afford Red Lobster.

  HOW TO HANDLE RACIST HECKLERS

  Getting onstage was a tremendous high and I was hooked. For the fleeting moment when I was onstage, I was able to forget about all my life’s problems and be truly in the moment. I’ve seen comedians trade money, weed and sexual favors for stage time. If stand-up is your addiction, stage time is your crack. During my first two years of stand-up, I did seven to ten sets a week and I didn’t get paid for a single one of those early sets. I would do any type of show, at any venue, in any situation. I’ve done stand-up at a nursing home before bingo night and I’ve performed at a children’s party where I had to compete with Spider-Man for their attention. My friend who ran a bar in San Diego asked me to do his Monday stand-up show at his bar. “It’s a fun show, the crowd’s a little rowdy, but it’s a good crowd. You should come do it.” I needed a hit of that crack.

  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 c
ould 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.

  Backstage, Arsenio joked, “This is gonna be the last time you ever talk to me, you’ll be too famous to talk to me after this.”

  “Thank you so much for having me on your show, Arsenio. I’m sure I’ll talk to you again, hopefully I’ll be on this show again.”

  “You got it, man, would love to have you back.”

  I never got to go back on the show again. Three days later, The Arsenio Hall Show was abruptly canceled. CBS had originally signed on for a second season before I went on the show, but they decided to pull the plug on it three days after I went on. Coincidence? Probably. Or maybe this hot Asian chick was too hot for America. Either way, I felt lucky that someone dropped out so I became the very last stand-up comedian to ever perform on The Arsenio Hall Show, joining the likes of Eddie Murphy, George Lopez and Andrew “Dice” Clay. On my following birthday, Jeremy gave me a custom-made poster that said: YOU GOT ARSENIO CANCELED. I now proudly hang this magnificent poster in my living room, as I will cherish this moment forever.

  Rush Hour 4?

  CHAPTER SIX

  HOW TO

  STRIP CLUB DJ

  The names of the people in this chapter have been changed in order to protect their identities and my safety. Yes, this chapter is about to get gangster.

  I’d only been to a strip club once in my life when I was eighteen years old. Phil took me to a high-end strip club with velvet curtains and chandeliers in Westwood in LA. I was blown away by how beautiful the dancers were. They didn’t look like strippers; they looked like sorority girls from USC. They probably were actual USC students trying to pay off the astronomical tuition. I was not a very confident eighteen-year-old, and I was sure the strippers could smell the virgin on me. Phil offered to buy me a lap dance but I was afraid of the unknown behind those VIP curtains, so I turned it down. I wasn’t interested in throwing money behind the brass railing in exchange for a pair of blue balls. I wanted to be an insider who knew these girls on a real-name basis. I wanted to be a strip club DJ just like Guam. Guam was definitely no role model, but my young and impressionable libido was incredibly envious of him sleeping with eighty strippers. Becoming a strip club DJ was the only way to instantly transform myself from a sexually frustrated chump to a world-class stripper whisperer. Being a strip club DJ became my American dream.

  I was working at the used car lot during the day and then putting in work at the Comedy Palace every night. Old Larry at the car lot had a friend named Shooter who came to visit him at the lot every week. They knew each other from AA or ’Nam or something, I forget. I think it was AA. Or maybe it was AA in ’Nam. Larry lived in Shooter’s apartment. When you are sixty years old and you still crash at a buddy’s apartment, you know you have made some serious mistakes in your life. Shooter was a notorious figure in the San Diego underworld. Word on the streets, Shooter did twenty years of hard time in prison for something involving a dead body. I didn’t dare to dig any deeper. He wasn’t affiliated with any particular gangs, but all the gangs respected him. Shooter also owned a strip club in San Diego.

  Shooter was in his sixties; he rocked a thin Mohawk and wore a pair of black plastic Choppers sunglasses. Have you ever looked at a guy and you know he could kill you without flinching? Well, Shooter looked like he would beat that guy to death with a sledgehammer. Whenever he entered a room, he exuded a dark aura of power. He was like the Undertaker from the WWE, except this was real-life hellfire and brimstone. I was scared, but absolutely fascinated by him. Every time Shooter came in, I looked up at him in awe. I thought gangsters were so cool, let alone a gangster who owned a strip club. Larry had told Shooter that I did stand-up and Shooter quickly took an interest in my comedy. He probably noticed the admiration in my eyes. The first time he talked to me, I was as nervous as a nerdy high school freshman talking to the starting varsity quarterback.

  “Hey, kid, I heard you do stand-up,” Shooter said to me in his gravelly Mickey Rourke voice.

  Even though I knew he was a gangster, I tried to stay composed and talk to him like any normal person. “Yeah, I’m usually at the Comedy Palace. You should come by sometime,” I replied.

  “Sounds good. I can bring some of the girls from the club.” In case you’re wondering, by “girls” he meant strippers. I could barely contain my excitement. I couldn’t wait to show off my soon-to-be stripper fans to the boys at the Comedy Palace.

  I realized talking to gangsters is like talking to celebrities; you just have to treat them like normal people and not freak out over who they are. They don’t like to be treated differently; they just want a genuine conversation like everyone else. Gangsters have feelings too.

  That weekend, Shooter rolled up to the Comedy Palace in a white stretch limo. One by one the strippers girls strutted out of his car. Everyone in the parking lot stopped and stared. I proudly whispered to Guam and Tarrell, “That’s my boy, Shooter.” Guam nodded in approval. And without taking his eyes off the girls, all Tarrell said was, “Damn!” It was one of the coolest moments of my life.

  That night, I felt like a gangster myself. When you are on the good side of a gangster, you feel safe and invincible. All the comedians were extra motivated that night and we put on a killer show. I could see Shooter and the girls clapping their hands, laughing like innocent children. For a moment, Shooter went from a feared gangster to a regular, happy audience member. That’s the magical thing about stand-up comedy. No matter who the audience member might be, if you can make him laugh, you’ve got a fan for life.

  After the show, the girls came up to me one after another to give me a hug. “Oh my God, you were so funny!” “Hilarious!” “That was amazing!” These positive affirmations from the strippers felt as legit as a raving New York Times review. Sean, Tarrell, Guam and all the other comedians looked on in awe. I got all the stre
et cred I could ever wish for that night.

  Then Shooter walked over to me and simply said, “Good job” as he made his way into his limo. I knew this was my chance; I saw my American dream of working at a strip club flash in front of my eyes. I seized the moment and I ducked my head in the limo before Shooter closed the door.

  “Hey, do you need a new DJ for your club?” I nervously blurted out.

  “You free this Thursday?”

  FUCK. YES.

  FANTASY SHOWGIRLS

  I couldn’t sleep for the next few days. I felt like a kid who just got the golden ticket to Shooter’s Stripper Factory. All the years of sexual frustration in high school and college would finally be forgotten. This would be my ultimate redemption from Guam and Tarrell making fun of me in the back of the Comedy Palace. I pictured the hottest strippers surrounding me as I spun on the ones and twos at a fancy strip club that was like a kind of heaven for dudes.

  When I stepped foot into Shooter’s club on Thursday, I realized it was nothing like the paradise I had imagined. It was inside an old wooden bungalow in the shady part of town. The exterior was pink and powder blue with an old wooden sign that read: FANTASY SHOWGIRLS. There were no velvet curtains or chandeliers. I entered through a giant wooden door and swam through some old crusty purple curtains, and there I was, in the shittiest strip club I had ever seen. It was nothing like the swanky strip club Phil had taken me to in Westwood. If the Westwood strip club was a Michelin-star restaurant, this strip club would be a taco truck on the side of a gas station. It was a seedy, dystopian joint where dreams came to die. The inside smelled like years of despair and ball sweat, with a hint of stripper lotion. To this day, I’m not sure what strippers put on their bodies, but every stripper wears that same distinct stripper lotion. Nowadays, that smell brings me a satisfying nostalgia. The chairs and VIP booths were old Goodwill-quality pieces with suspicious stains on them, but the lights were just dark enough that you could trick your mind into not seeing them. There was a bar in the middle of the club. It was a sad, lonely island that only served sodas and Red Bulls. Under California state law, a fully nude club cannot serve any alcoholic beverages; only a topless club can serve alcohol, and ours was the fully nude variety. I never really understood that law. I guess the lawmakers thought the exposure of vaginas mixed with alcohol was the tipping point that would make people’s brains explode or something. Everyone knew this; customers just showed up wasted anyways. It was a sound strategy for veteran perverts.