LAS VEGAS (KTNV) — Whether it’s his comedy specials on YouTube, his stand-up shows at Jimmy Kimmel’s Comedy Club, or his podcast with his parents, comedian and actor Michael Yo keeps busy on a number of platforms.
It’s his material about his family that has really taken off, recapping stories of growing up in a biracial household, the product of a Black father and Korean mother.
Justin Hinton sat down with him to hear what it means to make sure people are laughing with him, not at.
Justin Hinton: I think there are so many stereotypes around members of the AAPI community. It's like ‘Oh, you're Asian. You're going to go into STEM,’ and here you are going into comedy.
"Yeah, 'cause I was dumb," Yo said. "I was not smart. My dad has a PhD in nuclear physics. He's the one that told me to drop out of college."
Hinton: No he didn't.
"Yes he did," Yo said. "He goes, ‘You're not smart.’ He goes, ‘This college thing is not for you. You need to go do what you love. Entertain people. That's what you're good at,’ so that's what I did.
Yo got his start as an entertainment reporter on “Chelsea Lately,” a late-night comedy talk show hosted by Chelsea Handler.
Yo became good friends with Handler and fellow comedian Jo Koy and decided to try his hand at comedy one day.
“After I got off stage, I’ll never forget it, I called my mom and said, ‘This was what I was born to do,’” Yo said.
He hasn’t looked back.
“What's funny about the comedy community, I remember Asian people started off as a punchline. They're the only people who don't get mad for getting made fun of, because they didn't have a voice in comedy, but now you hear the Asian point of view," Yo said.
From people like Jo Koy and Jimmy O. Yang to Margaret Cho and Russell Peters, Yo says AAPI comedians have always been around.
He says now, there’s more investment in what they bring to the table, telling their own stories.
Yo has a lot of them.
“From a punchline to now, you're punching back, and you're letting people in. That was the thing before. No one really knew in comedy about the Asian community besides the stereotypical things, but when you open the curtain, you're like ‘Oh, they're just like us.’”
He says it’s his way of reclaiming his identity.
“I would never make a ‘We can’t drive’ joke, but it’s a thing of if I did, I would give you an example of exactly where that happened. It’s not just throwing it out there as an empty statement,” he said. “I would have a story with it, or ‘I hate that that stereotype is true,’ and I would give them a story where I saw it happen.”
Michelle Liu is a professor at the University of Washington.
She studies and teaches comedy with an emphasis on AAPI representation.
She says it’s exciting to see authentic AAPI stories told through laughter because it changes how people perceive Asian Americans, allowing for a more genuine sense of connection.
“It deeply rewires what people are laughing at in order to even start thinking about the project of what it means to laugh with, and laughter is always the soul of belonging,” Liu said. “I really credit people like Michael Yo doing something that brought Margaret Cho onto the scene when she started in the 1990s.”
She says Yo and other comedians like him are making space, rather than asking for inclusion into something that’s already built, something she loves about stand-up comedians.
“He, like so many other historically minoritized people, is going out making space for themselves and that just produces a totally different way to frame how parents may even see their child and what they expect of them.
And from telling his own stories, he’s grown closer to his own community.
“I'm more connected to my Asian side at a later age than I ever have been in my entire life,” he said. “I take classes 3-4 times a week to try to learn Korean. I’m more connected than ever. Not just because Jo Koy started me or I’ve been out with Jimmy O. Yang or Ronny Chieng. I just want to know that community more, so over the past couple of years I really took initiative to be a part of it more.”
