Ronny Chieng on tackling offensive topics: "If you want to play with dynamite, you’d better be spot on"

The New Yorker

The Daily Show correspondent, whose Asian Comedian Destroys America! Netflix special was released Tuesday, addressed the Shane Gillis SNL controversy in a New Yorker profile, saying: “If you want to play with dynamite, you’d better be spot on. But the idea that you can’t joke about a certain thing—as a comedian, you take that as a challenge. There’s a lot of stuff that you try that you probably shouldn’t say publicly, but the idea of solving that puzzle: how do you take a horrific thing and find the joke in it? Frankly, if you do comedy professionally that’s just the way your brain works.” He added: "Someone is always going to be offended. One of my openers in the special is about how measles is coming back to America. Like, we’re bringing back measles! I think that’s a funny premise. Someone with measles would probably be, like, ‘That’s f*cked.’"

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• Ronny Chieng considers The Daily Show the Harvard Business School of comedy: "I learned a lot about comedy before I got there, but I’ve learned even more by just working there," he says. "This hour is actually a really fun product of all the stuff I’ve learned at The Daily Show — how to tell jokes at a higher level, telling jokes with meaning, writing better punchlines, being a better performer. Plus, I moved to America when I was 30 years old. I could feel myself maturing then. It felt like my personality was maturing more than my art and what I was saying. So, over the last four years, I’ve managed to catch my comedy up to my personal life."
• How Chieng's standup is different from his work on The Daily Show: "I started doing stand-up comedy and I continue to do standup comedy," he says. "All throughout The Daily Show I continued to do stand-up every night in New York and on weekends I'll tour standup, so if anything, it's really The Daily Show, which is different to my stand-up, but the stand-up has been usually pretty – I don't want to say consistent because obviously my voice has changed as I've matured as a comedian and as a person, so I think my voice has gotten a bit more mature comedically, but if anything it's not that I'm consciously trying to separate myself from The Daily Show. It's that The Daily Show was a separate thing to what I was already doing."