The Economist April 2nd 2022 Culture 77Stand-upcomedySeriously funny
D
uringhisstandupsetattheLondon
Palladium, Phil Wang explored his
mixed heritage—his mother is British, his
father is ChineseMalaysian—his love of
unusual delicacies and his enthusiasm for
male contraception. He closed with some
advice for these fractious and sensitive
times: in particular, on how to gauge
“whether or not it is morally acceptable to
do another person’s accent”.
First and foremost, he argued, the
speaker must put in the time and effort to
make the impression convincing. Beyond
that, any country that has had an empire—
or was on the “naughty” side in the second
world war—is fair game. This “gets you
more accents than you think”: as well as
many European ones, Chinese, Egyptian,
Japanese, Russian and Turkish are permis
sible. Just the thought of such imperson
ations makes his leftleaning white friends
queasy, he confided. Yet given their coun
try’s vaulting ambitions, for the Chinese, at
least, such neuroses are trivial, he insisted.
After all, “the eagle does not concern itself
with the impressions of the worm.”
Mr Wang is one of Britain’s sharpest and
most surprising standup comedians,
widely known for his observations on race
and the legacy of colonialism. The set he
performed at the Palladium and elsewhere
on his recent tour, called “Philly Philly
Wang Wang”, was released on Netflix last
year; he embarks on his first American
tour, with fresh material, this month. His
new memoir, “Sidesplitter: How To Be
From Two Worlds At Once”, includes incisiveessaysonlanguage,culturalassimila
tion and dating. Meanwhile “BudPod”, a
podcast cohosted with Pierre Novellie, a
fellow comedian, has exceeded 2m down
loads since its debut in 2019.
His life and career are an accident of
history, both grand and intimate. Britain
controlled parts of the Malay peninsula be
tween the 18th and mid20th centuries; it
was exerting a softer kind of power by the
time Mr Wang’s mother, an anthropologist,
joined the Voluntary Service Overseas. She
was posted to northern Borneo where she
met Mr Wang’s father, a martialarts teach
er. The comedian was born in 1990 in
StokeonTrent in central England, but his
family returned to Malaysia soon after
wards. In his book he interweaves their
story with that of Kota Kinabalu, the city in
which he grew up, and his attitude towards
his own identity. “For an enterprise so
heavily associated with death,” he writes, “I
ironically owe the British Empire my life.”
He acknowledges a debt to British com
edy, too. From a young age he watched
shows like “Blackadder” and “French and
Saunders” (while admiring Harith Iskan
der, the “godfather of standup comedy in
Malaysia”). Comedy was a safe haven dur
ing tough years at a Chinese school, where
there was a “constant threat of physical
pain” from corporal punishment. This per
iod shaped his career in another way. “I be
came really introverted and quite afraid of
speaking out,” he says, leaning back and
closing his eyes, as if recoiling from the
memory. “Then finding standup, it wasthis form of communication that I thought
I could do. I felt I could earn the right to
speak by writing something funny.”
Moving back to Britain in his teens, Mr
Wang took part in his first comedy night at
school. Most of the material was borrowed:
“I didn’t realise at the time you had to write
your own jokes.” He went on to Cambridge
University, which had a thriving comedy
scene, and became president of the Foot
lights, an incubator of entertainment
greats including Eric Idle and Hugh Laurie.
In 2010 he won the prestigious Chortle Stu
dent Comedy Awards. Steve Bennett, editor
of Chortle, a comedy website, recalls his
cool delivery, selfdeprecating jokes and
“intricate, detached wordplay”.
That accolade helped Mr Wang make
comedy a fulltime job. He has since ap
peared on assorted television and radio
programmes and, alongside his standup
gigs, performed with a sketch group called
Daphne. He has encountered bigots as well
as fans. In one painful passage in “Side
splitter”, he describes how a woman in the
audience once loudly announced that he
was unattractive because of his ethnicity.
The incident confirmed his comic voca
tion, he says, making him even surer “that
British society would benefit from an out
spoken East Asian making jokes about
himself from a place of authority”.
Mr Novellie, his collaborator on “Bud
Pod”, likens Mr Wang’s ability to take on
subjects such as race to that of American
counterparts such as Dave Chapelle. As
well as their joint interest in history, films,
games and scatological mishaps, Mr Nov
ellie—who was born in South Africa and
brought up on the Isle of Man—suggests he
and Mr Wang share an “outside perspec
tive”. That means that when they discuss
subjects like the Elgin Marbles, ancient
Greek sculptures currently held in the Brit
ish Museum, they are not constrained by
the sense of national embarrassment that
many of their liberal peers exude.
For his part, Mr Wang denies that com
edy has a political duty. He says he mostly
strives to entertain, encourage listeners to
take themselves less seriously and point
out jarring truths—such as, in his bit about
impressions, Chinese people being consi
dered a “very vulnerable minority” in Brit
ain while also being linked to a “globally
very powerful” country. Yet, intentionally
or otherwise, he is a subtle champion of
nuance and balance.
He uses the setups of jokes, and the
sudden switch of a punchline, to under
mine preconceptions about people and
places. Perhaps, he says, the gags would
come easier if he were more polemical.
“It’s much more funny to have a really
strong opinion about something and
scream about it, than it is tosay:‘But let’s
look at this from the other perspective’,” he
concedes. “But I don’t. I can’t.”nPhil Wang’s jokes take on controversial subjects with nuance as well as wit