Finding Flaws in the Mona Lisa

Ronny Chieng’s provocations fall flat.

Speakeasy opens with a shot of the comedian Ronny Chieng and his wife walking through New York’s Chinatown to the croon of a Chinese folk song, then ducking into Chinese Tuxedo, the Cantonese restaurant that serves as the night’s venue. When he takes the stage, dressed in a white tux jacket and bow tie, he stands on a small round platform in the middle of the dining space, circled by red lanterns, candlelight, and foliage from more equatorial climates. This comedy special—Chieng’s second with Netflix—is flowing with Chinese American iconography.

It’s a bummer, then, that Chieng’s actual material never becomes as interesting as Speakeasy looks. Chieng holds a rare position: He’s a globally oriented stand-up whose main job is making comedy out of American politics. Born in Malaysia and ethnically Chinese, Chieng grew up partly in Singapore and partly in the U.S. By the time he moved back to the States in 2015, he was a successful comedian who had already toured throughout Australia, New Zealand, and Asia. But this country is where he found the grandest possible platform for his work after landing a spot on The Daily Show—led by another globally oriented comedian, Trevor Noah.

Chieng has a compelling, kinetic presence. He often comes off as if he were restraining himself from grabbing you by the lapels. He’s best in the first half of Speakeasy, which opens with a lament about American covid skepticism. “All these fucking D-average students who are in the back of the classroom their entire academic career,” he grumbles, an accusing finger piercing the air.

“Stay the fuck in the back! Don’t come to the front during a pandemic because you figured out how to start a podcast.” Other sections revolve around conceits in which Chieng capitalizes on the gap between the

American audience and the specificity of his own background: “It’s very hard to explain Singapore to Americans.” A beat. “It’s very hard to explain any other country to Americans.” There are some tired bits, including a joke about the Pill. An early crowd-work gag that asks which race has the worst racists comes with a payoff so predictable I’m pretty sure I’ve seen it somewhere else. The special isn’t helped by the sprawling diatribe about critics that anchors its closing stretch. “Who the fuck reviews comedy unironically?” Chieng asks. The section suffers from a lack of both precision—online trolls, professional critics, audience members, and Twitter are all conflated—and actual insight. “You can find flaws in anything if you look hard enough,” he says. “You can find flaws in the Mona Lisa. What does that mean?” Yeah, okay. What does that mean? The more promising aspects of Chieng’s work have always come when he exploits the edges that his biography affords him. An early bit in Speakeasy gets at the difference between him and most Asians living in America: By virtue of his comfortable Southeast Asian roots, international career, and growing success, he has the power to opt out. “Cancel me. Cancel me. Do it. Cancel me,” he says, faux-begging and working up to a frothing point. It’s a common tactic for Chieng—accelerating and chaotic, he hits the same words over and over to a point of deafening saturation. (In his first special, he did this to comment on the supreme conveniences of Amazon: “We need it, Prime. We need Prime. Harder, faster, stronger.”) It’s in line with Chieng’s persona, marked by stuffy exasperation over the stupidity of the world. When the punch line comes here, though, it’s a wicked turn: “What are you going to do? Cancel me, so I have to go back to Malaysia … where I’m a national hero? And the currency advantage is very much in my favor?”

The joke whips back around. Why does Chieng even want to be here, when “half the country has lost its mind, the virus is raging out of control, major metropolitan areas are literally on fire”? Or so says his mother in an appeal to him to leave the U.S. “I had to tell my mom, ‘Mom, you don’t understand. You don’t see what I see,’” he says. “‘That America, despite all its flaws, is still the country where you can tell dick jokes for $12 in New York City.’” I can’t help but feel invested in Chieng’s work. Like him, I’m an ethnically Chinese Malaysian with ties to Singapore and Australia—an Asian in America, not an Asian American. What he and I have in common, and what we don’t, means I also can’t help but notice a somewhat conservative bent to his comedy, a meritocracy-obsessed bias that, to me, feels very Singaporean. That comes across in Speakeasy in various forms: in the way Chieng dings covid skeptics for being poorly educated; in his rant that “before you’re allowed to comment on something online, you should be made to do something with your life”; and in the special’s closing joke, in which he talks about the time someone physically attacked him on the street. “I still respect that woman more than these fucking Twitter, Yelp-reviewing bloggers,” he concludes. “Because she was unhappy about something in her life, she got off her ass and did something about it. She didn’t just sit behind her keyboard … No, she didn’t like Asian people; she went and committed a hate crime.” It’s an intriguing twist. It also doesn’t work. Given that the bit is anchored in Chieng’s sensitivity to online criticism, the absurdist provocation feels wasted on a shallow conceit. These aspects of Chieng’s work deserve more scrutiny than they get. Frankly, so does my own impulse to view his work in relation to Asian American culture. The problem is that gains among Asians in U.S. entertainment—let alone the comedy world—are still a recent phenomenon. It’s almost impossible not to see Chieng’s growing profile as part of the “representation” conversation and the tensions that come with it. Speakeasy plays with the symbols of identity, and Chieng’s jokes often draw on tropes associated with Asian America. Those seem good enough reasons to wonder whether he actually has anything to say about them—and to be frustrated when he refuses to speak for anyone but himself. But maybe that’s unfair. Maybe we should take him at his word. “Everybody thinks that just because I’m on The Daily Show, I’m here to save the world,” he says in the special. “I’m not here to save the world, man. I’m here to talk shit, make money, and bounce!” ■