Joel Kim Booster

Joel Kim Booster grew up in a small Illinois town, homeschooled by deeply conservative adoptive parents. Now he’s a gay comedian who can’t stop talking about sex. Whether he’s riffing on an eye-opening orgy in Amsterdam or childhood porn experiences, Kim Booster does rawness with exceeding geniality. We caught up with him via Zoom from his Los Angeles home.

You’ve said you knew you were gay before you knew you were Asian. Please explain.

That is completely true. I was adopted. I grew up in the Midwest, homeschooled. And I don’t think it was until I was 5 or 6 when I went to a family reunion in Alabama that my Asian identity really started to click for me. By that point, I had already verbalized to my siblings that I liked boys. The Asian part came later.

What makes sex funny?

It’s so personal and it’s so individual. Trying to extrapolate broad observations about sex, it’s a great place to find a lot of comedy because it’s finding the broad in the specific. Culturally, it’s still fairly taboo, and I think there’s a lot of humor that can be derived from taboo subjects. … So many people are having bad sex because they’re not talking about the things that I am interested in talking about on stage.

Is gay sex still more taboo in comedy than straight sex?

Absolutely. I can’t talk about my relationship or dating or anything like that without it being sort of labeled a gay joke. Whereas [for] any straight comedian who talks about dating, it’s just a dating joke. I think there’s still resistance from audiences depending on where I am in the country.

I had a lot of comedians — when I was starting out, over 10 years ago now — tell me not to talk about anything that could be related to gay sex because audiences would not like it and would not be able to handle it. And that was sort of the conventional wisdom for a lot of gay comedians. Now it’s sort of like, I don’t give a f—. I try not to shy away from anything I want to talk about just because it might make an audience uncomfortable. Discomfort is a huge part of comedy sometimes.

You were on an NBC sitcom, “Sunnyside.” Did your parents ever watch it?

No. I don’t think my parents have ever seen it. They didn’t know about it until they saw me in a trailer for it on television. It’s just my mom now, but yeah, she’s deeply uncurious about my career in a way that I’m perfectly comfortable with.

Joel Kim Booster performs at 7 p.m. at Dynasty Typewriter at the Hayworth, 2511 Wilshire Blvd.