How to be a foreign comedian in America

The advice John Oliver gave Ronny Chieng.

Ronny Chieng’s new special on Netflix. Watch here.

Ronny Chieng was recently interviewed on Fresh Air by Terry Gross. He explained the advice he got from John Oliver on being a non-American correspondent on "The Daily Show." Oliver said it took him two years to relearn how to do comedy in America.

Chieng:

My interpretation of what he was saying, is that when you come to America as a foreign headliner comic, you can do comedy for five minutes, 10 minutes, 15 minutes. You can kill for - you could maybe even kill for 30 minutes, but you're always doing comedy as, like, the outsider. You know, meaning, like, you're coming in, you're making fun of America on a very surface level. And that works for about nine months. But after nine months or, like, 11 months, I think the audience and you yourself subconsciously can feel the inauthenticity of that in the sense of, like, you've been here long enough. You should know that this isn't that weird.

Why are you still making fun of five flavors of Coca-Cola, you know? Like, you should know better now. You've been here long enough. And so the point was that it took two years to really kind of get a little bit more understanding of America where you could joke about it in a way that, one, Americans haven't heard before, and two, in a way that they agree with you in the authenticity.

A good lesson for all comedians in there is to seek jokes that are both authentic and that no one’s heard before.