Joel Kim Booster on discovering he's Korean, comedy as defence, and the thirst for diversity

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      A South Korean adopted at birth, lovingly raised, and home-schooled by white evangelical Christians in a quiet, predominantly white suburb of—whew!—the American Midwest, comedian Joel Kim Booster has famously joked that “I literally knew I was gay before I knew I was Asian.” He isn’t exaggerating.

      Speaking to the Straight by phone between sets at Montreal’s Just for Laughs Festival, Booster remembers confessing to his brother and sister, at the wholesome age of four, that he enjoyed looking at naked boys more than he did naked girls. It’d be another two years—at a very white, very parochial family reunion in Alabama—before he realized that he, well, wasn’t white. “It wasn’t until then that I was like, ‘Oh, I am not like everyone else here,’ ” the comic shares. “And that is when I think I really started to wrestle with that.”

      Booster has had plenty of time to embrace his cultural—and queer—identity since. Now based in Los Angeles, the 30-year-old often pokes fun at his peculiar upbringing while skewering problematic stereotypes of Asians and the LGBT community on-stage. On his debut album, Model Minority—the name a reference to the harmful myth that those of Asian descent are somehow more predisposed to success than other people of colour, thus diminishing the systemic injustices they face—he laments that he’s terrible at math, doesn’t know karate, and has a “huge” dick.

      In another bit, he draws attention to the fetishization of Asian men in the queer sphere by recalling the “horror movie” of going home with a non-Asian date, only to discover that said date’s apartment was littered with Thai cookbooks, katanas, and—shudder—rice-paddy hats.

      With his infectious zeal and natural, nonchalant delivery—the man broaches the unwelcome return of Nazis like he’s giving a rundown of the previous night’s sloppy events over brunch—Booster readily wins over audiences. In eight years, he’s risen from near obscurity to comedy-fest regular, appearing on Conan twice since 2016, earning a spot on Forbes’s 30 Under 30 list, and releasing his first televised special for Comedy Central last fall. Not bad for a former theatre kid who dived into standup when he was unhappy with the limited scope of roles available to gay Asian actors in early-aughts Chicago—and who began fine-tuning his comedy as a defence mechanism against hurtful, offhand comments from peers.

      “If I was making fun of myself, then it sort of took the sting out of anyone else trying to do it,” he says. “And my observations about my own shortcomings were much sharper and much funnier than anybody else’s could be.”

      These days, the comedian talks through such trauma with a therapist, though he maintains that his multifaceted identity remains an important part of his work. He wants to show others what it looks like—for one person, anyway—to be queer and Asian-American. “I’m trying to present a fully realized experience of a human being to people who maybe only have a very two-dimensional idea of what it means to be gay, or what it means to be Asian,” he explains. “And if I can sort of open that up and present, like, ‘This is my very specific experience and it might look different from what you understand it to be,’ then I think that is the move in the right direction.”

      Now that Booster has established himself as a relatively well-known standup personality, he’s excited to spotlight other parts of his life—say, his “existential crisis about killing a spider or cumming”—behind the mike. Off-stage, he hopes to connect with his South Korean roots by visiting his birthplace of Jeju City, a scenic resort town situated on the country’s largest island. The comic says that, growing up, he was encouraged by his parents to explore his heritage, and they offered to enroll him in Korean-language classes and take him to Korean restaurants. However, he rejected many of these efforts, not wanting to be reminded that he was “different”. That’s changed now: “The older I get, the more I’m kind of drawn to go back and see everything,” he notes.

      The fact that he is different—a queer Asian-American man cracking jokes in a realm ruled overwhelmingly by straight white dudes—has helped propel standup forward, too. “This is a really exciting time, because people talk about the diversity quota—quote-unquote—and whether or not it’s good or bad for comedy,” he says. “And I don’t think it’s a zero-sum game for anybody. I think we’re just building a new audience, and attracting a new audience that never felt like standup comedy was speaking to them before.

      “Gay people and Asian people are really, really underrepresented in comedy and just in pop culture in general,” he continues. “So both those communities are so thirsty to see anything that’s speaking directly to them.”

      Joel Kim Booster plays Celebrities Nightclub, with guests Darcy Michael and Tin Lorica, on Thursday (August 2). For event details, or to purchase tickets, click here.

      Follow Lucy Lau on Twitter @lucylau.

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