Live From New York.
My conservative guy friend, he doesn't understand the 'woke' talk.
He’s like “I don't get it man, what's the difference between mansplaining and just normal explaining. I'm just explaining man.”
Ok, mansplaining is
when a guy is explaining,
and he is
UGLY.
<crowd laughs>
The ladies laughing, they get it, guys are like “I'm not ugly. I'm going to mansplain to you how I'm not ugly.”
When an ugly guy's explaining shit to me I'm like ‘shut the fuck up!’
But if he's hot, then
~ oh I don't know anything ~
What IS Chinese New Year?
You’re so smart.
That’s why you're assistant manager at Best Buy.
This joke made me blow air out of my nose.
Especially when the comedian is an Asian woman.
It’s a good joke.
We think mansplaining is about the guy thinking he’s smarter than everyone in the room, but the twist is the unexpected punchline on how the conversation is irrelevant. It’s his attractiveness, about the feeling he is projecting.
It’s not what you say, it’s how you look when you say it.
It’s not the asshole guy who’s in power; but the women who allowed the guy to be an asshole.
The second punchline is cultural, she picked the most mansplainable topic a guy can mansplain to an Asian woman - Chinese New Year.
The final punchline was the ‘assistant manager at Best Buy’. Poking fun at the assistant role, yes, but it is to remove any doubt that the topic was completely out of his scope, and a reverse mansplain - how the woman is so patient at the guy showing off his knowledge. He’s that hot.
Anyway, it was funny to me.
I liked the reel and followed the comedian.
A month later, I saw her name attached to the word ‘scandal’.
People were pissed off at her joke.
What, did the feminist get to her?
My first thought.
Apparently, no, it’s a different joke.
A joke about the relationship between Singapore, Malaysia, and the missing Malaysian plane.
The Malaysian government was trying to get Interpol involved to track her down.
Over a joke.
That’s right, the comedian is Jocelyn Chia.
When I followed Jocelyn she was already performing in the Comedy Cellar.
That’s how the algorithm targeted me. My Instagram is full of jokes, food, and ‘six ways to fix a hunchback’.
So when the news broke, I sent Jocelyn a DM.
Malaysians are overreacting.
Your materials are good. Fuck Don’t worry about them.
Why did I do that?
Well, there’s another therapy session backstory to this, do we have time?
It’s my newsletter so I say we have time.
Some of you would remember COVID in 2020, the lockdown, and how I started sharing my recipes on Facebook, which became a self-published cookbook, and in a way this newsletter.
I have also mentioned in my chat with Diem that behind every thousand likes, you’ll get twenty unsolicited, nasty ones. I have witnessed enough social media campaigns to know that for a fact. But what I didn’t expect was private DMs with two words sentences like ‘Fuck you’ ‘You suck’ and ‘Eat shit’.
Anyway, long story short: hostility, strangers, internet, not fun.
That’s why I sent Jocelyn a message.
I guess because I’m a father to a daughter.
Seriously, check out the comments on any of her YouTube videos. Nothing is about her craft, all personal attacks on her appearance, gender, and everything in between.
Hopefully, out of the millions of abuse she’s getting in her inbox, she’d appreciate some positive feedback.
And she replied.
She replied and eventually, I made my usual thick-face request and she agreed to a video chat.
Stood me up the first time because she had a TV recording, but that’s all expected. She’s a much bigger shot than me.
We finally found a pocket of time hidden between New York (7pm) and Fukuoka (8am) last month.
J: So what do you want to talk about?
H: I don’t know, I usually write about food, but I’ll find a way to tie everything together later. Maybe more about how the discussion should have been about how amazing it was for an Asian female comedian to be able to perform in New York, but now it just become this shit show instead. You said it's kinda a good thing that you have the exposure, but I’d like to know how you dealt with it in the beginning. It just seems like you're really strong. You look like you don't care about it.
Yes, I agreed to this chat because you offered me a food tour haha! (H: Shhh!) And thanks! True, I am very strong, but perhaps being at a more mature stage in life helped too. If a teenager in school all of a sudden gets mass-hated on, I'm sure that'll be very difficult because that teenager doesn't know who else to talk to, and is not mature enough to know that people can just be dicks, especially in this day and age. I mean, you're getting hate for a recipe. So people are just shitty these days. I am lucky in the sense that my industry, unfortunately, has all these people hating on comedians. So I can talk to my other comedian friends, and they can tell me what they do and their perspectives.
One piece of advice that was helpful for me was Zarna Garg saying “If you're not my audience member or a business booking me, then you're completely irrelevant” And so that's how you have to view your haters - Who is this person hating on you? They know who you are. You have no idea who they are. So I look at it like I am doing something that made an impact whereas all these trolls, nobody even knows who they are. I mean, Prime Ministers now know who I am! And other than Lee Hsien Loong I don’t know ANY of these politicians commenting on my joke. When reporters were asking me what I thought about what the Singapore foreign minister said, and they just gave me his name, not his title, I was like ‘Who is she? I didn’t read what she said.’ (Turns out he is male but has a woman’s first name haha)
Oh and by the way, not reading the hate? That's probably the BEST strategy you can deploy, which I did. I remember coming across an article where the writer had put a screenshot of some Malaysian writing to me “Jocelyn, before you block me, I just wanted to say...” and I laughed that this idiot actually thought I would bother to read what he wrote in the first place when thousands of people have been trying to comment.
Also, you have to know that if people are trying to hate on you, that means you are in some way actually doing something. So just be like, you know what? I'm better than this person. I'm the one making waves. I'm the one making an impact. Think, okay, you're the loser here for hating on something that you can't even do. How many Malaysians or Singaporeans are performing at the Comedy Cellar? There is not a single Singaporean comedian at the Comedy Cellar. None of them have made it in, and I have. So who are they to talk? Actually, it’s not even the comedians who are criticizing me, ok maybe just, one - K, who's worried about his work in Malaysia as he said so. So he's a <censored> and a bit of an <censored> and stupid as <censored>.
No way! He's Singaporean, right?
He's Singaporean, and completely ignorant. A Singaporean comedian should know that Singaporean comedians make fun of Malaysian airplanes all the time. Sam See, a Singaporean comedian even stated so publicly. The video is on YouTube. Even Malaysian comedians and other Asian comedians make fun of the Malaysian airplane all the time. So that's why these Malaysian and Singaporean comedians, 99% of them didn't criticize me, because they know better. And to my knowledge, at least two Malaysian comedians publicly defended me (but got vilified).
It makes no <censored> sense. Honestly, comedians do Malaysian Airlines jokes even IN Malaysia so this is just not a taboo topic in comedy no matter what the ignorant folks think. We've MANY comedians doing 9/11 jokes and over 1000 written ones on the internet as a reference point for how the whole ‘how can you joke about the tragedy’ is from a very comedy-ignorant point of view.
What was it K said? You shouldn't make jokes about other people's pain?
No, he said that I had issues and that I needed to seek mental help. Yeah, that was disgusting. How dare you insult a fellow professional comedian at the top of her game in New York City. The hardest city to make it in. And you dare to insinuate I have mental health issues? Because I'm killing it in New York City? Like, go <censored> yourself. I WAS named the top comedian in Singapore by two Singapore publications and he was all the way down at number 8 or something. So perhaps he’s also jealous ha. Also, I read he struggles with mental health himself so I'm sure he was just projecting. Ironically, it is because I have made a concerted effort to improve and protect my mental well-being ever since COVID brought it to the forefront of my priorities, that is why I've managed to be so mentally resilient throughout this nonsense.
I’m picturing your expression as you receive advice to seek mental help from a cross-dressing comedian.
Yeah, because he said comedy shouldn't be used to express hate. I'm like, you of all people should know that comedy is just acting. Are you really a woman? You're not, right? So if I don't believe that you're a woman, why would you believe that I'm really hating on Malaysia? Like God what a <censored> <consored>, literally.
This is all good. Let it out.
Anyway, what I cannot decide now is if I should finally respond to it. I mean, I've been very busy and I've been procrastinating.
Do you want to, though? I don't know. It would just give them the joy that you’re affected and they’ll find another way to escalate it.
I mean, I don't care if it stirs them up. I just want to say my piece, for my sake, to let it out. The only decision is, do I say, it in a mean way, or do I do it in a more reasonable way?
You should be the mean person. I mean, the ‘mean person’ that you are portraying. Because if you’re nice, then they think you’ve backed down. Just tell them what you told me, like, no, you guys are the idiots. Like that guy who called Malaysians, what, a bunch of collective wet wipes on BBC.
Oh, you saw that one? Yeah. Francis. Another American comedian posted a joke within, like, a month of mine going viral. The joke was “Why do we call it ghosting when a guy disappears on us? We should call it ‘Malaysian-planing’”.
<cringe laughing>
Man. So that's why I'm very ‘bo gam wan’. One month after I posted mine, she posted this. Nothing happened to her. Isaac Butterfield shared his Malaysian airplane joke soon after mine went viral in his response (which was fabulous by the way) to the Malaysian overreaction. No shade on him at all. And while I didn’t think this way at first, SO many people commented that “if she (meaning me) were a white guy doing this joke nobody would even blink an eye.”
Actually, I did mean to ask. Have you ever considered, like, you’re targeted because you’re Asian and female?
It’s possible. Women, and female comedians, in general, get more online hate than male comedians, so that's probably a factor. I personally don't think that was all of it because Malaysian haters have tried to destroy other male, Malay comedians in Malaysia and Singapore as well. Fakkah Fuzz and Rizal Van Geyzel come to mind. So while sex and race may have played a role, because I’m a lawyer and need evidence and I don’t have the evidence to compare apples to apples in this case, I can’t say for sure. However, my gut instinct does agree with a lot of the commenters who said that if it was a white guy saying this nobody would have even blinked an eye. Honestly, I think the Singaporean part played a big role because of the two country’s histories. One podcaster was saying “She stirred up tensions and emotions that were already bubbling under the surface” which I thought was insightful.
Imposter syndrome, do you have it?
I had it when I first got into the Comedy Cellar because the best comedians are there. Then after a while of seeing how well I was doing, even the owner said “You fast-rose to the top of the pack in terms of the audience response”. And I kept getting booked over and over again, and getting in is one thing, getting booked again is another.
So I still have my insecurities with my craft, but I don't really have imposter syndrome about being in the cellar anymore. But in the beginning, I was like, oh, shit. I have to follow all these people. Like Hasan Minhaj or David Spade or Michael Che or Andrew Shulz. I shared the stage with Chris Rock and Louis CK. It's nuts.
Like I said, I really wish people would focus on that…
<fades out>
How do I tie this back to food?
Every restaurant wants to be liked.
Every reviewer wants to be liked.
Every photographer wants to be liked.
But as Jocelyn said earlier, people can just turn out to be dicks.
You can’t be liked universally.
Just aim to be liked by the right amount of dicks.
On the flip side, if you know certain dishes, restaurants, or content offends you.
Walk away.
If you didn’t enjoy a restaurant, pay for the dish and service and never return.
Don’t expect the cleanse the world just because it doesn’t fit your taste.
It’s not your job, and even if it is, you don’t have to sign up for a fake account, write a one-star review, issue death threats, and comb through comments, looking for affirmation.
Unless, of course, you secretly love it.
Jocelyn is on Instagram, Facebook, YouTube, TikTok, Patreon, but like having a meal, it’s probably best to catch her live in New York.
And for my paid subscribers, the proof is also in the audio.
Here’s a short audio clip of our chat.
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