Right in the middle of his latest Netflix special, comedian Phil Wang starts talking about his memory. He says that he doesn’t have a good memory. He goes on to elaborate on that point, but he fails to remember what he was going to say. That’s a great joke right there. So subtle, that you marvel at it. Wang extends it further by giving an example of a good memory of someone he knows. He compares it to a folder, while he describes his own as mist. It’s still so very funny, although I wish he had cut it a little bit short.
I have no such complaints against Wang’s set. Rarely in a one-hour comedy special, every single joke lands right. Wang doesn’t tell one bad joke. He does play a simple trick, though. He doesn’t let the good ones end and keeps carrying them around. And no, it doesn’t get boring. The comedian tells a joke, and you laugh with him. But instead of jumping into the next one, Phil Wang amplifies the joke and takes it to another level. That’s a risky proposition, but the comedian appears to be confident enough to pull it off.
In Wang’s stand-up special, there’s not much of a theme. Well, it can be said that the comedian (and his life) himself is what this is about. It’s rightfully called Wang in There, Baby! thanks to the comedian having a surname that sounds a lot like the word “hang.” He also has the advantage of having a multi-cultural origin. Phil’s father is a Malaysian-Chinese. And his mom happens to be British, with a bit of French on her side of the family. Thanks to her, Phil is very tall. He’s almost six foot two, which a lot of people find surprising thanks to their preconceived notion of Asian people being generally short. What makes things stranger is Wang has a nerdy face that does not go with his body, which he terms the body of a bully. Well, I thought he looked pretty normal from what I saw on Netflix, but I also find the joke funny.
Speaking of funny, the best part about “Wang in There, Baby” has to be the opening ten minutes. That has a lot to do with my affinity for rice due to hailing from India. Wang starts by saying white people have this issue with reheated rice before zeroing in on white British people. His show is being filmed in London, by the way, which is why he’s trying out this joke, which has bombed in America. Wang continues to tap on British habits and food culture, which tell them to not heat rice to avoid getting their stomachs hurt. But fried rice, which is actually made with leftover rice, is absolutely fine. This is obviously an idiotic thing, and Wang starting his show with it is good enough to get me vibing with him.
With his first joke, Wang pretty much sets the tone of the special. He’s going to make fun of British people, and he has the right to, given he himself is one. But before that, he gets into his own story. His mother met his father and moved to Borneo. Phil grew up in Borneo, where it’s very normal for crocodiles to stroll around shopping malls. That’s a joke, of course (hopefully), but Phil delivers it with a straight face before starting to talk about his life in the UK after moving. Phil soon takes it to America and starts comparing the very different cultures of US and UK. This segment is nothing short of hilarious, especially when Phil brings up how Americans and the British use two similar-sounding but vibe-wise vastly different slang words to describe human buttocks. That’s all I can tell you about this thing, but I promise this particular part is going to crack you up.
If I have to pick the two best jokes from the entire set (choosing one is harder here actually), then one of them would be the one about the size of male genitals. Instead of generalizing it, Phil makes it boldly personal by telling his own story of writing a book and casually mentioning his “size” in it, but then freaking out after receiving a very routine call from his female editor. Even though it’s nothing but a courtesy to do a final check and let them know about any changes, Phil is unsure about the size he has mentioned there. And he needs to know for sure. So there he goes, on an adventure that starts from three and a half inches, but no matter how hard he tries, he fails to reach beyond five and a half. Where’s the joke? Well, he does call the editor and asks her to change the size because it’s actually seven. This is not a true story, of course, but the comedian is doing a commentary here about male insecurities over the size of their genitals and pretty much acing it.
The other top joke also involves male genitals, and this one is also personal. But compared to the other one, this one is more creative and even has a supernatural angle to it. It also involves a subsection about Chinese medicines. Wang doesn’t shy away from calling them bad and ineffective except for giving you an erection. The multi-layered joke is about how Malaysians believe in ghosts, and instead of comforting them when they see one, they bring ghost medicines for the kid. Imagine a thirteen-year-old taking one such ghost medicine and having a hard-time for hours! I don’t generally go in for recommendations, and even while reviewing something, I don’t try to push you towards it or the opposite, but I’ve got to say Wang’s standup here is truly brilliant, and you’re going to miss out if you don’t give it a watch.
