Ronnie Chieng
Appearances
Fresh Air
Best Of: Comic Ronny Chieng / Writer Miranda July
And I said, oh, thanks so much. I didn't think too much about it. Right. And then maybe two years later, I get this email to audition for The Daily Show. And I was like, it was like a dream come true. I couldn't believe it.
Fresh Air
Best Of: Comic Ronny Chieng / Writer Miranda July
And so I still remember doing the audition in my apartment in Melbourne and sending it in and then getting the call back to come to New York City and audition for The Daily Show in New York City, which was obviously a huge deal if you're coming. From Australia. And so, no, I did not expect to get it at all. It was very much him who put the spotlight on me.
Fresh Air
Best Of: Comic Ronny Chieng / Writer Miranda July
As in, The Daily Show would never have found me if not for Trevor insisting that I get on. And again, I'm not his closest friend, you know? I don't even think I'm his funniest friend. He just really was adamant that he wanted an Asian person on the show because he felt that Asian people are like half of the world's population, but...
Fresh Air
Best Of: Comic Ronny Chieng / Writer Miranda July
there's no presence in on the daily show and he i guess at that time he was thinking of a more international show right so he wanted someone who could talk to these issues so i'm just lucky that i was the recipient of his search you know it could have been anybody how familiar were you with the show Very familiar. I've been following U.S.
Fresh Air
Best Of: Comic Ronny Chieng / Writer Miranda July
politics since the West Wing came out, was watching it religiously, and then started, you know, always reading about U.S. presidential history. I'm a U.S. president nerd. And The Daily Show, we were watching it as soon as we were able to illegally download it in Australia. We would torrent, like, The Daily Show and The Colbert Report and watch it. So I'm a huge fan. I was watching all the time.
Fresh Air
Best Of: Comic Ronny Chieng / Writer Miranda July
Yes, there's a photo of me standing there not knowing what to do. I was in the studio right next to him. But obviously off his camera. But there was a camera on me because I was doing a segment with him, as you said. And then we finished the segment. And then usually he says, okay, everybody, Roy Chang, everybody. And then everyone applauds and I leave the studio. But he didn't do that this time.
Fresh Air
Best Of: Comic Ronny Chieng / Writer Miranda July
He explained why he was leaving the show on air. And no sign of it. There was no sign. I didn't know he was doing that.
Fresh Air
Best Of: Comic Ronny Chieng / Writer Miranda July
I don't know. He's a very smart guy and I trust his judgment on everything. And I'm sure he had his reasons, you know, and I can't speak to them. But I'm sure he had his reasons to do it because it seems like a pretty extreme thing to do.
Fresh Air
Best Of: Comic Ronny Chieng / Writer Miranda July
Maybe he didn't want anyone to talk him out of it. I don't know.
Fresh Air
Best Of: Comic Ronny Chieng / Writer Miranda July
Yeah. But yeah, maybe you don't want anyone to leak it. That's also a possibility or, you know.
Fresh Air
Best Of: Comic Ronny Chieng / Writer Miranda July
I was like, is this a bit? And then in my head, I was also like, well, we're 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?
Fresh Air
Best Of: Comic Ronny Chieng / Writer Miranda July
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.
Fresh Air
Best Of: Comic Ronny Chieng / Writer Miranda July
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. I care about the job a lot. I love it. It's the best job in comedy.
Fresh Air
Best Of: Comic Ronny Chieng / Writer Miranda July
But I adopted this very live in the present, I guess, Buddhist, 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.
Fresh Air
Best Of: Comic Ronny Chieng / Writer Miranda July
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. If all those factors combine, if America cannot have a daily news satirical show, no one can.
Fresh Air
Best Of: Comic Ronny Chieng / Writer Miranda July
Thank you so much for having me. This is a real honor to be on the show and to speak to you. Thank you so much.
Fresh Air
Best Of: Comic Ronny Chieng / Writer Miranda July
This is The Daily Show with your host, Ronnie T.
Fresh Air
Best Of: Comic Ronny Chieng / Writer Miranda July
You just feel the Chinese coming on, right?
Fresh Air
Best Of: Comic Ronny Chieng / Writer Miranda July
Stand-up comedy, are you out of your mind? That's not even a real job! Like, what do you think is gonna happen? You're just gonna run around America and tell jokes to strangers who don't give a about your mental health?
Fresh Air
Best Of: Comic Ronny Chieng / Writer Miranda July
Daddy's a borderline arena act in some markets. Have you seen my IMDB page? I'm in everything. I will crush your career. Oh, Gary, your mother and I did spend a fortune to make an A-grade blastocyst for them to become a B-grade comedian. I will never watch anything you do. Go to law school! Oh!
Fresh Air
Best Of: Comic Ronny Chieng / Writer Miranda July
Thank you. Thanks for having me on. And I'd like to note the contrast between the yelling of that clip and how calm the rest of the interview will be.
Fresh Air
Best Of: Comic Ronny Chieng / Writer Miranda July
He said no white person will ever buy a ticket to go watch you.
Fresh Air
Best Of: Comic Ronny Chieng / Writer Miranda July
No, I didn't think that was true. But I didn't tell him I was going to go do it. I went to go do it. And then he found out after I've been doing stand-up comedy for about two years. And then he found out. And he was trying to... Protect me, you know. He was worried. He was worried about what was going to happen, you know, what my future was going to be. And then later on, he got behind it.
Fresh Air
Best Of: Comic Ronny Chieng / Writer Miranda July
No, I didn't tell them I got hired on the show.
Fresh Air
Best Of: Comic Ronny Chieng / Writer Miranda July
It wasn't so much afraid. It was that I didn't want to brag about small achievements. I just wanted to do the work. I didn't want to tell them that I joined this institution, which, quite frankly, they didn't really know about anyway, and make it sound as though I made it, quote-unquote. You know what I mean? Well, you kind of had.
Fresh Air
Best Of: Comic Ronny Chieng / Writer Miranda July
Sure, but I don't know. I think the work comes first, you know, getting the job is one thing, but then can you do the job? And so it honestly just came out of kind of humility of like, oh, yeah, I'm on The Daily Show, but doesn't mean I've done anything yet. So why tell them, you know, like my philosophy was like, like, just do the job and then maybe they'll hear good things about you.
Fresh Air
Best Of: Comic Ronny Chieng / Writer Miranda July
And then that will be the, you know, I mean, like I didn't need the flowers from them.
Fresh Air
Best Of: Comic Ronny Chieng / Writer Miranda July
Quite frankly, if you want to talk about bragging rights for them, once I started doing decent work and people started liking what I was doing, then they would go up to them and be like, hey, your son is on The Daily Show. Which I think is better than you coming out and trying to brag about something. At that point, I hadn't even been on screen yet.
Fresh Air
Best Of: Comic Ronny Chieng / Writer Miranda July
I'm not sure how popular The Daily Show is in Singapore or Malaysia. So I'd rather just do the work and then hopefully people like it.
Fresh Air
Best Of: Comic Ronny Chieng / Writer Miranda July
Sure. I'll let you guess which one's New York, which one's New Jersey in this analogy. But yes, it's just a bridge across that is called the causeway. People cross the bridge from Johor Bahru, Malaysia to Singapore every day. Every morning people wake up in Malaysia, go to work in Singapore and come back. braving the traffic and the fumes and the immigration.
Fresh Air
Best Of: Comic Ronny Chieng / Writer Miranda July
No, was not. The stand-up I was exposed to was in New Hampshire when my parents would play Seinfeld, the sitcom. And so you would see Seinfeld do stand-up in his interstitials, right in between the narrative, he'd do stand-up. And I remember asking my mom, like, hey, and that was the first time I saw, I even knew that that could be an art form.
Fresh Air
Best Of: Comic Ronny Chieng / Writer Miranda July
just standing there and telling jokes with no other props and you know, it's just you and a microphone. And I told my mom like, hey, I want to try that someday. And my mom was like, oh, okay, cool. And I was like four years old.
Fresh Air
Best Of: Comic Ronny Chieng / Writer Miranda July
To be honest, when we watched it in... When we were watching in Malaysia and Singapore, we think that they're white people. At least for me anyway. I didn't realize like they were like a special type of ethnicity. I thought they were just a type of white person. And so when you're watching it, you're like... Like you get little samples of Jewishness in it, right? They'll drop a Yiddish word.
Fresh Air
Best Of: Comic Ronny Chieng / Writer Miranda July
They'll have a Hanukkah. They'll have little things here and there where you slowly start to be like, oh, these, I think they're different to white American people. And we didn't have any stereotypes. So I just thought they were New Yorkers. You know what I mean? I didn't think like, oh, this is Jewish behavior or this is a Jewish joke. I just thought, oh, these are New Yorkers.
Fresh Air
Best Of: Comic Ronny Chieng / Writer Miranda July
That's how New Yorkers talk. Until I came here, I realized, oh, it's its own thing.
Fresh Air
Best Of: Comic Ronny Chieng / Writer Miranda July
That's a great question. I think, first of all, one, we might be in media silos. So the stuff I say on a daily show might not actually ever reach my mega friends because we're all so siloed in our media consumption. That's one. And then two, I think that decent people have a sense of humor. about things, you know?
Fresh Air
Best Of: Comic Ronny Chieng / Writer Miranda July
So I wouldn't take the comment section as reality in terms of what the reaction is to a clip in the comment section from MAGA people about political clip. I don't necessarily think they would react that way in real life face-to-face. And third of all, Hawaii is a very different vibe, you know? Like, Hawaii people know how to get along for the most part.
Fresh Air
Best Of: Comic Ronny Chieng / Writer Miranda July
I think in Hawaii, they know how to put community before themselves, which is very un-American, by the way. This idea that in Hawaii, you know, everyone's very generous and you get more than you give in Hawaii if you come with the right energy. And so I like to think that in Hawaii, I always try to come with the right energy.
Fresh Air
Best Of: Comic Ronny Chieng / Writer Miranda July
I won't be so presumptuous to say that I always manage to nail it, but I think I come with the right energy and I think the locals and the Hawaiians there respond to that. So... You know, they can be, you know, hardcore MAGA people, but they, you know, they're totally cool with me as far as I know.
Fresh Air
Best Of: Comic Ronny Chieng / Writer Miranda July
Those are all very concerning. Don't get me wrong. I think if he does any of that, it is upsetting and subverts the legal process in many ways, in some ways more blatant than others. My answer to that is we had four years of him. And The Daily Show was making fun of him every day during those four years. And essentially nothing happened.
Fresh Air
Best Of: Comic Ronny Chieng / Writer Miranda July
So just going off of history and past evidence, which is all I kind of have to go by right now, is that kind of... you know, that for me, that's kind of a sign of, um, how it's going to be, you know, what, what his bluster versus his actual actions. Uh, I reserve the right to change my opinion. If, if we all end up in jail, if we all end up in jail, then I will, I'll probably be wrong.
Fresh Air
Best Of: Comic Ronny Chieng / Writer Miranda July
Uh, but maybe I'm just, this is just wishful thinking on my part, but, uh, Yeah, he said a lot of concerning things about the law. But I think ultimately, I believe in American institutions. I believe in checks and balances.
Fresh Air
Best Of: Comic Ronny Chieng / Writer Miranda July
You know, I believe that the entire founding of America was geared around having a weak federal executive who is unable to kind of use the government to go after citizens individually. I think that's the whole premise of America. And so because of that, I'm a bit more hopeful.
Fresh Air
Best Of: Comic Ronny Chieng / Writer Miranda July
By the way, what do I know? I'm just a comic, just making dick jokes. But that's what I hope and that's what I believe. And that's why I'm still here.
Fresh Air
Best Of: Comic Ronny Chieng / Writer Miranda July
So I guess American democracy still works as long as the guy who likes overthrowing the government wins the election because then he won't overthrow the government. So with the transfer happening, we're going to be talking about Trump again every day for another four years, I guess.
Fresh Air
Best Of: Comic Ronny Chieng / Writer Miranda July
And I, for one, did not think that when I came out of the jungles of Malaysia to do comedy that I would be making jokes about Donald Trump every day for 13 years straight. 13 years. I don't talk about anybody as much as... I don't talk about my mom as much as I talk about this guy. I don't talk about my wife as much as I talk about this guy.
Fresh Air
Best Of: Comic Ronny Chieng / Writer Miranda July
Yo, my wife thinks I'm having an emotional affair with him. I'm going to be talking about this guy on my f***ing deathbed, okay? Which I assume will be in three years when he somehow brings back the bubonic plague. And you might be sitting at home saying, well, Ronnie, why don't you just shut the f*** up about Trump? Well, for the same reason CNN doesn't shut the up about him. Money.
Fresh Air
Best Of: Comic Ronny Chieng / Writer Miranda July
Lots and lots of money. So let's get these dollars right now and get back to Donald Trump.
Fresh Air
Best Of: Comic Ronny Chieng / Writer Miranda July
Extremely surprised. Because we weren't necessarily friends. He was obviously much more successful than me in the festival circuit. So we rarely crossed paths. And I ended up performing with him for the first time in Canada, just for laughs, in Montreal. And that's when he... was very friendly to me at the show. He was very complimentary. He said, it's great. You know, what you're doing is great.