Ronny Chieng (performing a bit)

Maybe he didn't want anyone to talk him out of it. I don't know.

Yeah, but... Oh, yeah, maybe he didn't want anyone to leak it. That's also a possibility, you know?

I was like, is this a bit? And then in my head, I was also like, well... Well, not live. You know what I mean? Like he could say that and then we could just edit it if he changes his mind. So I was like, this sounds serious. I don't know what's going on. I'm a person who I think I do a decent job at minding my own business. So I wasn't like, well, what's going on?

I wasn't trying to like insert myself into this situation. You know what I mean? I was like, oh man, what's going on? You know, it sounds like he is going through some stuff. And so I hope he's okay. You know, that was my primary thought.

You know, honestly, I wasn't thinking that because I was here because of Trevor. If I lose the job because of Trevor, I was okay with that. You know what I mean? I wasn't supposed to have this job anyway. So I've always adopted this very nihilistic view about the job and doing it. Not nihilistic. Like I care about the job a lot. I love it. It's the best job in comedy.

But I adopted this very like live in the present, I guess, Buddhist, you know, don't worry about the future kind of mentality with the job. And the second thing is also I believe that America will always have a daily satirical news show. You know, I think of all the countries in the world, if America can't do a daily satirical news show, like which country can? We have the most freedom of speech.

We have the most resources for show business. We have infrastructure for comedic talent where people can write and get better as performers and writers and can aspire to be hired on shows like this. And we have the craziest political news. Like, if all those factors combine, if America cannot have a daily news satirical show, no one can.

Which we have all the time, by the way. Yeah, yeah, yeah.

I can talk about it, but to be honest, I don't know the reasoning. Maybe it's just hard to find someone to do it. It's a tough job. I mean, I guess what I can say is... I think the way it is right now, it makes sense because Jon wants to be on.

The legendary Jon Stewart is on once a week. And the way he described it was... We as a satirical news organization, we should be trying to cover the climate instead of just chasing the weather, right? That's how we get an elevated show is if we can describe the climate, the political climate of America versus just chasing these individual news stories. And so...

What the current arrangement does is that it allows Jon Stewart to come in and talk about the climate once a week and give us the big ideas in America. And it allows the rest of us correspondents to do a bit more weather chasing, which...

As much as we're trying to avoid that, unfortunately, it's necessary weather chasing sometimes because ultimately our job is to make fun of the news and the news happens every single day. Not that we have to avoid discussing the climate, but we can also, it freezes up to kind of chase the weather a bit and nobody gets burnt out.

So as long as the quality doesn't drop, I mean, you know, this might be the way to do it.

Yes, yes. But that's the beauty of the show is that we're actually making fun of these stereotypes. Yeah. Sorry, of these tropes.

Maybe I should set up also that we are working in a restaurant in Chinatown, but we are also characters in a TV show who don't realize that we're in a TV show. So we are... on the surface, working at this restaurant, but we are working at a restaurant in the context of being on a law and order type show. So that's the meta aspect of it.

Yes, yes.

Okay.

Somebody threw away an entire Peking duck with the sauce and everything. You're a , man. I'm the . You are the one who's hoping it was a dead person.

I'm very complimentary of you, yeah.

Yeah, that's a good question. Creativity Asians was my first movie, so I had nothing to compare it with. But I will say on set, you could feel this really cool camaraderie and chemistry. We all had this shorthand. We were all Asian actors in our 30s and we were all in this movie for the first time.