Time to Stand Up
For an Asian American woman, performing comedy is about much more than jokes.
In honor of May celebrating AAPI Heritage Month and Mother's Day, I recently pitched and published a (long) personal essay about my experiences performing stand-up comedy as an Asian American woman interweaved with my relationship with my mother in the Harvard Magazine.
Below is an excerpt from the full article, which can be read here: https://www.harvardmagazine.com/2023/05/time-to-stand-up
“Making her debut here, let’s welcome the incredible Catherine Yeo!”
I shuffled to the front of the room, an illuminated open mic “stage” in what felt like the modern-day American dungeon: the dingy gray basement of a fast-food restaurant in downtown Boston. It was a Monday evening in September, yet the sides of the room were already lined with dozens of amateur comics. My heart hammered against my chest; I wondered if I could magically wind back time by 30 seconds and call an Uber home.
I grabbed the microphone and squinted against the searing spotlight. I had done stand-up on campus several times before, but this was my first taste of performing for the world outside the Harvard bubble. I noticed that there was only one other Asian woman in the line of comics. It was too late to bolt off the stage, so I swallowed my fear and took a deep breath.
“In America, elementary school math questions look like ‘Mr. Smith bought 94 apples at the supermarket… How many apples did he buy?’ Meanwhile in Singapore, the questions actually asked me to do math… which I thought was very rude.”
Crickets.
Joke after joke fell flat. Every time I paused—for laughter that never came—I peered into a sea of blinking eyes and sympathetic winces. In the silence, I could hear the audience munching on soggy French fries and slurping their sodas, the crinkles of the greasy paper wrapped around towering burgers that threatened to fall apart in one’s hands with any wrong move.
Three minutes into the set, a sequence of three jokes finally sparked a burst of chuckles. I latched onto that laughter and powered through the rest of my jokes, with deafening silence ringing in my ears.
I finally stepped off the stage to polite claps. What was I doing here? I sank back into my chair, with the shadow of my mother’s lifelong disapproval fluttering in my mind. But there was something else too: a burning desire to come back and prove everybody wrong—most of all myself.
To continue reading the full essay, check it out here: https://www.harvardmagazine.com/2023/05/time-to-stand-up