Joel Kim Booster

And I think like crushing that first time was really, again, sort of changed the course of my entire life, because if I had done poorly, I don't think I would have tried it again.

And then for the next couple of years or the next, yeah, I guess like two years in Chicago, I was splitting my time trying to do theater and then trying to pursue comedy.

But unfortunately, it's not tenable to try and do both because especially to become a really seasoned comic in Chicago requires a lot of face time.

Like you don't just go to the open mic.

You stay after your set and you hang out and you make friends and you have to be in really like...

in that community to get booked, to come up, to rise, whatever.

And I just found it really difficult because I was so by that point in the theater community and that's where all my friends were, that was what I was interested in.

And so I was doing standup at really unorthodox places.

I at one point was opening at the Steppenwolf Theater.

I would like open, if they did a comedy play, I would do standup for like 15 minutes before the play started.

to warm up the audience.

And so I was doing really unorthodox, untraditional, nontraditional avenues in standup that way.

And it would just became this point where it slowly became the more interesting thing I was doing.

It started as like a fully, just like this will be an artistic outlet for me to like have total freedom because you know, the parts that I was getting called in for were not always super interesting as an Asian American man.

This was well before we were having the kind of diversity discussions we're having in casting now.

And it just felt really freeing because I was like, Oh, I can get up on stage, write a version of myself that feels authentic, and, you know, have full creative control over what I was doing at the time.

And then that control just became more and more alluring to me.

And

To the point where about two and a half years into living in Chicago, I said, I need to move to New York because I need to do this full time.

And the only way to do that is to completely start over in a new city and start this process again.