Ronny Chieng (performing a bit)

Goddamn villages, there's jobs, man. Have you guys thought about anything else here? In business, not everything turns out the way you want it to. But hey, with a little ingenuity and some American can-do spirit, you too could turn 13,000 jobs into 2,000 and put your whole village into debt. Great job.

Goddamn villages, there's jobs, man. Have you guys thought about anything else here? In business, not everything turns out the way you want it to. But hey, with a little ingenuity and some American can-do spirit, you too could turn 13,000 jobs into 2,000 and put your whole village into debt. Great job.

Daddy, daddy, when I grow up, I want to be a stand-up comedian, just like you.

I just feel the Chinese coming over.

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?

Even if you do somehow manage to overcome the odds and make it to even a semi-professional level as a stand-up comedian, do you think there's any chance in hell you'd be funnier than me?

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 him.

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 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 nevertheless nevertheless when you were on the daily show and you started on the daily show you didn't tell your mother no i didn't tell them i got hired on the show what were you afraid of 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.

To be clear, that's a bit.

So the premise of the bit is that if I have a kid, what's going to happen if they want to do stand-up comedy? And I realize I'm just like my parents. Like, even me, who has done stand-up comedy professionally, if my kid wanted to do it, I'd be like my dad, too. I'd be like, why are you doing this? This is crazy. Especially me knowing what's involved in stand-up comedy.

All the more that I'm like, are you sure you want to do this? And one of the things I know about comedy that is, I think, quite a difficult thing to overcome is overcoming people's apathy and... And their lack of concern for your mental health. Which, by the way, is part of the reason why I never told anyone I was doing comedy. Not my friends or my parents or my family.