Ronny Chieng (performing a bit)

Because I wanted to test it in that environment. I wanted to test my comedy in an environment where nobody cared about you. Because I felt like if I could make these people who didn't care about me at all laugh, maybe this could be a job for me.

Yes. Yeah.

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.

Yes.

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.

That's how New Yorkers talk. Until I came here, I realized, oh, it's its own thing.

Yes.

It was a reboot, yeah.

Yes.

That's a great question. I think, first of all, one, we might be in media silos. So the stuff I say on a daily show might not actually ever reach my mega friends because we're all so siloed in our media consumption. That's one. And then two, I think that decent people have a sense of humor.

about things you know so i wouldn't take uh the comment section as reality in terms of what what the reaction is to a clip in the comment section uh from mega people about political clip i don't necessarily think they would do react that way in real life face to face and um third of all hawaii is a very different vibe you know like hawaii people know how to get along for the most part

I think in Hawaii, they know how to put community before themselves, which is very un-American, by the way. That this idea that in Hawaii, you know, everyone's very generous and you get more than you give in Hawaii if you come with the right energy. And so I like to think that in Hawaii, I always try to come with the right energy. I won't be so presumptuous to say that I always manage to nail it.

But I think I come with the right energy and I think the locals and the Hawaiians there respond to that. So yeah. You know, they can be, you know, hardcore MAGA people, but they, you know, they're totally cool with me as far as I know.

Oh, you're quoting my special. Yeah.

Yeah.

Yes.

Um, those are all very concerning. Don't get me wrong. I think if he does any of that, it is upsetting and subverts the legal process in many ways, in some ways more blatant than others. My answer to that is we had four years of him. And The Daily Show was making fun of him every day during those four years. And essentially nothing happened.