Minor Feelings: An Asian American Reckoning(12)
It’s also harder to bullshit one’s way through comedy, because the audience cannot be convinced into laughter. Real laughter is an involuntary contraction that bursts out of you like an orgasm. You laugh from surprise but you’re only surprised once, which is why comedy ruthlessly lives in the present. Nothing gets dated faster than a joke.
Comedians not only need an audience, they are desperate for an audience. Even when they were bad at it, I was fascinated by how comedians reeled their audience in to their act, drawing on the audience’s responses and discomfort for material. In the beginning of Live in Concert, Pryor not only confronts the racial makeup of his audience but turns his white audience members into a spectacle, making them self-conscious for even returning to their seats: “Jesus Christ! Look at the white people rushing back!”
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The literary scene has since diversified, but when I was younger, whether the reading was held at a bar, bookstore, or university, I read mostly to a white audience. The white room was such the norm that often I barely even noticed it. But when I did, I began to feel the whiteness in the room. If a neutral background color, say white, turned traffic-cone orange everywhere you went, you’d become chronically stressed and your mind would curdle like a slug in salt. That’s how I felt. Only I had to pretend that I wasn’t seeing traffic-cone orange everywhere.
Poetry readings served no function except to remind me I was dangerously losing faith in poetry. Maybe once, readings were a vital form of commons, but now readings felt terribly vestigial with all their canned ecclesiastical rituals: the scripted banter, the breathy “poet’s voice,” the mechanical titters, the lone mmm of approval. While I sagely nodded along to a poet praising the healing powers of poetry, inside I was going into diabetic shock from their saccharine sentiments. The worst was that I was lying to myself. I was that poet who dismissed the thought of audience because it would corrupt my artistic integrity. But at readings, there was no denying it. I was performing for a roomful of bored white people and I desperately wanted their approval.
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I never directly addressed my audience except to thank them and reassure them I only had two poems left to read, an embarrassed gesture most poets make to concede that they know their reading is a tedious burden. It never occurred to me to directly address the whiteness of the audience the way a stand-up comedian would. It never occurred to me to belt out a question like “Any Latinos in the crowd?” and allow the silence to linger a beat too long before I belted out, “Any black people in the crowd?”
I always pretended like I wasn’t the only Asian woman in the room, which, for me at least, freighted the air with tension as if my body were the setup to a joke that never became defused by a punchline. But why not defuse it? If there was this expectation that I should write about my Asian identity, why not say out loud that I was the only Asian in the room?
I began to do stand-up instead of reciting my poems at readings. I just couldn’t bear to do another poetry reading, since the humiliation of it stayed in my skin for a few days like radioactive material. I thought by doing stand-up I could at least humiliate myself deliberately, which seemed less toxic somehow. At first, I recited jokes by other comedians, which violates a cardinal rule in comedy, but I convinced myself I was pulling a conceptual stunt rather than actually doing stand-up. But then I began to slip in my own jokes, until I used only my own jokes, material for which I drew from my personal life. I was never an autobiographical poet. The fact that I now wrote about my life as jokes probably exposes my deep-seated masochism. If people didn’t find my jokes funny, I wanted to bomb spectacularly while telling jokes about my life. I wanted to fall on my face doing it.
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I never felt comfortable writing about personal racial trauma, because I wasn’t satisfied with the conventional forms in which racial trauma is framed. The confessional lyric didn’t seem right because my pain felt singled out, exceptional, operatic, when my life is more banal than that. I also couldn’t write traditional realist narrative fiction because I didn’t care to injection-mold my thoughts into an anthropological experience where the reader, after reading my novel, would think, The life of Koreans is so heartbreaking!
But after watching Pryor—and transcribing all of his visual and audio stand-up—I thought I could find a way into writing frankly about being Asian. My stand-up routine at readings, however, was short-lived. When I first performed, everyone laughed uproariously, which thrilled me, but normally people were confused. The event coordinators were baffled by my subterfuge and the audience didn’t know what to do but laugh uncertainly or look at me as if I had wet my pants. In Williamsburg, there was a bar called Kokie’s that actually sold cocaine by the jukebox for twenty dollars. I went there with friends in my twenties a few times. I bought a bag and sniffed it using my house key ridged with inscrutable grot in a curtained-off area with other random customers. One night, two big Dominican guys stared at me, astonished, until one of them said, “I never saw an Asian girl do blow before.”
I made a joke about that story. Another time, a Southern white journalist asked me what the real difference was between Chinese, Koreans, and Japanese people. I made a joke about my response to her question. My jokes were terrible and my delivery was awkward at best. I was experimenting, searching for a structure that pierced through the respectability politics that fogged the literary community at the time. Writers of color had to behave better in their poetry and in person; they had to always act gracious and grateful so that white people would be comfortable enough to sympathize with their racialized experiences. I never forgot hearing one award-winning poet of color say during a Q&A, “If you want to write about race, you have to do it politely, because then, people will listen.”