Telling Jokes (and Emotional Healing) with Youngmi Mayer

Youngmi grows up in Korea and Saipan (1:00) Feeling like an outsider as a white person in Korea (5:00) How feeling like an outsider has influenced Youngmi’s comedy (9:00) Complexities of biracial upbringing (10:45) Youngmi retraces her history with starting Mission Chinese restaurant (14:30) Working through co-dependency issues (17:58) How Youngmi was able to assert her own creative desires and goals, working through baggage of Asian American upbringing and depression (19:15) Doing the scary thing of pursuing creative endeavors and honestly facing the possibility of failure (24:40) The challenge of living transparently emotionally and being vulnerable (25:30) Processing and healing from repressive Asian upbringing (26:50) “Was it scary to get into stand-up comedy?” (28:20) Coming up with stand-up jokes and practicing them (31:00) Power dynamics: Commanding the room as a stand-up comedian while also being vulnerable (36:30) Stand-up comedy as means of self-healing and talking about personal history on stage as comedy (38:25) “Do you think you could handle fame/celebrity?” (40:05) Youngmi answers a spiritual question: “Why is there suffering in the world?” (42:55) You can check out Youngmi's podcast "Feeling Asian with Youngmi Mayer and Brian Park" here: Connect with Youngmi on Instagram:

You can listen to Telling Jokes (and Emotional Healing) with Youngmi Mayer online on Radio and Podcast. Open the player on this page to stream the available audio.

Telling Jokes (and Emotional Healing) with Youngmi Mayer is an episode from The Mechanics of Storytelling by Ezra Justin Lee.

This episode is 00:51:04 long.

This episode was published on Apr 20, 2020.

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