Ronnie Chieng
speaker
57 appearances
1 recordings
1 series
first heard Jan 2025
last heard Jan 2025
Ronnie Chieng’s voice in public audio — every appearance, attributed to the second.
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Appearances
This is The Daily Show with your host, Ronnie T.
You just feel the Chinese coming on, right?
Stand-up comedy, are you out of your mind? That's not even a real job! Like, what do you think is gonna happen? You're just gonna run around America and tell jokes to strangers who don't give a about your mental health?
Daddy's a borderline arena act in some markets. Have you seen my IMDB page? I'm in everything. I will crush your career. Oh, Gary, your mother and I did spend a fortune to make an A-grade blastocyst for them to become a B-grade comedian. I will never watch anything you do. Go to law school! Oh!
It's what my father said to me.
Thank you. Thanks for having me on. And I'd like to note the contrast between the yelling of that clip and how calm the rest of the interview will be.
He said no white person will ever buy a ticket to go watch you.
No, I didn't think that was true. But I didn't tell him I was going to go do it. I went to go do it. And then he found out after I've been doing stand-up comedy for about two years. And then he found out. And he was trying to... Protect me, you know. He was worried. He was worried about what was going to happen, you know, what my future was going to be. And then later on, he got behind it.
No, I didn't tell them I got hired on the show.
It wasn't so much afraid. It was that I didn't want to brag about small achievements. I just wanted to do the work. I didn't want to tell them that I joined this institution, which, quite frankly, they didn't really know about anyway, and make it sound as though I made it, quote-unquote. You know what I mean? Well, you kind of had.
Sure, but I don't know. I think the work comes first, you know, getting the job is one thing, but then can you do the job? And so it honestly just came out of kind of humility of like, oh, yeah, I'm on The Daily Show, but doesn't mean I've done anything yet. So why tell them, you know, like my philosophy was like, like, just do the job and then maybe they'll hear good things about you.
And then that will be the, you know, I mean, like I didn't need the flowers from them.
Quite frankly, if you want to talk about bragging rights for them, once I started doing decent work and people started liking what I was doing, then they would go up to them and be like, hey, your son is on The Daily Show. Which I think is better than you coming out and trying to brag about something. At that point, I hadn't even been on screen yet.
I'm not sure how popular The Daily Show is in Singapore or Malaysia. So I'd rather just do the work and then hopefully people like it.
Yes.
Sure. I'll let you guess which one's New York, which one's New Jersey in this analogy. But yes, it's just a bridge across that is called the causeway. People cross the bridge from Johor Bahru, Malaysia to Singapore every day. Every morning people wake up in Malaysia, go to work in Singapore and come back. braving the traffic and the fumes and the immigration.
No, was not. The stand-up I was exposed to was in New Hampshire when my parents would play Seinfeld, the sitcom. And so you would see Seinfeld do stand-up in his interstitials, right in between the narrative, he'd do stand-up. And I remember asking my mom, like, hey, and that was the first time I saw, I even knew that that could be an art form.
just standing there and telling jokes with no other props and you know, it's just you and a microphone. And I told my mom like, hey, I want to try that someday. And my mom was like, oh, okay, cool. And I was like four years old.
To be honest, when we watched it in... When we were watching in Malaysia and Singapore, we think that they're white people. At least for me anyway. I didn't realize like they were like a special type of ethnicity. I thought they were just a type of white person. And so when you're watching it, you're like... Like you get little samples of Jewishness in it, right? They'll drop a Yiddish word.
They'll have a Hanukkah. They'll have little things here and there where you slowly start to be like, oh, these, I think they're different to white American people. And we didn't have any stereotypes. So I just thought they were New Yorkers. You know what I mean? I didn't think like, oh, this is Jewish behavior or this is a Jewish joke. I just thought, oh, these are New Yorkers.
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