Alex Duong, a Vietnamese comedian who was finally seeing his acting and touring careers take off when he was diagnosed with a rare, aggressive cancer early last year, died Saturday morning in Santa Monica after going into septic shock, his wife confirmed on social media. He was 42.
“Alex was an incredible husband and father until his very last moment. He fought so hard for a year and never once complained about the pain he was in. The pain I feel now is nothing compared to what he endured,” Christina Duong, the mother of their 5-year-old daughter, Everest, wrote on Facebook.
Duong “wasn’t just a door guy, he was family,” the Comedy Store wrote Sunday on Instagram. “A loving husband, devoted father, and one of the hardest working, proudest members of The Comedy Store, he brought unmatched energy, heart, and hustle to The Store every night. We love you and will miss you. Thank you for being part of our family.”
Born the youngest of six children on March 20, 1984, in Dallas, Duong wound up leaving school to pursue a feature development deal for his screenplay “Enchanted Melody,” but that fell through because of financing. The story was ultimately turned into a stage play and showcased by the East West Players, L.A.’s top theater company for authentic Asian American stories.
Before his diagnosis, Duong had been set to open on tour for Ronny Chieng — “a big thing in our world,” according to “The Vietnamese” podcast host Kenneth Nguyen — and, after trying his hand at acting since the mid-2000s, had done a three-episode, three-season guest star arc on “Blue Bloods,” playing Sonny Le opposite Donnie Wahlberg’s lead character Danny Reagan. Wahlberg told him he might see work on the “Blue Bloods” spinoff “Boston Blue.”
“Blue Bloods” writer Van B. Nguyen drew a complex leadership life-arc for Duong’s gang member with a heart of gold. The “Jeff Ross Presents Roast Battle” veteran had decided to turn down one-line roles and roles in which he was playing an Asian stereotype. His career was taking off after the better part of a decade doing sets at the Comedy Store, where he was the first Vietnamese American person to work as a door guy.
Then it all fell apart.
Duong was diagnosed with alveolar rhabdomyosarcoma, a rare soft tissue cancer, shortly after the Palisades fire rained ash on his family’s West L.A. apartment in 2025. He had a “mental breakdown” over the fires and the destruction they wrought, he said on “The Vietnamese” in February 2025, and had to stop wearing his contacts because a pressure headache was building behind his eyes. It finally localized behind his left eye.
His manager at the Comedy Store pulled him aside and said, “Your left eye looks like it’s about to fall out. You should go home,” Duong told The Times last April. His wife urged him to sign up for medical coverage and go to the emergency room to get checked.
He had been healthy, was nine years sober, and the family hadn’t been able to afford health insurance. “It was easier to pay the fine when you pay your taxes than to pay $12K a year,” he said.
Duong made sure his health coverage had kicked in before getting care. After a week getting steroids and pain medicine at Providence St. John’s Medical Center in Santa Monica, he received the biopsy results: an extremely aggressive malignant mass was blocking blood flow to Duong’s optic nerve.
Removal of the tumor was scheduled for two months later, so Duong went home to his family for the weekend. By Monday, he was blind in his left eye. He returned to St. John’s and had urgent surgery to remove the mass, but without a promised neuro-ophthalmologist in the room, the comic said on “The Vietnamese,” they didn’t get the entire thing, leaving cancer behind his eye.
Duong said that “out of pure frustration” after 2½ weeks of hospitalization — during which he was “getting fat and missing [his] family” and wasn’t satisfied with his care — he signed himself out St. John’s and took an Uber to UCLA Medical Center in the middle of the night in search of a specialist. UCLA Health had neuro-ophthalmologists on staff who focus on neurological diseases and other diseases, like Duong’s, that affect the optical nerve. It also had orbital surgeons.
He started chemotherapy soon after the February podcast was recorded and was getting white blood cell injections to help boost his immune system.
A couple of months later, he told The Times, he was $400,000 in medical debt and grateful for the support he and his family were getting from his comedy colleagues. A co-worker of his wife had launched a GoFundMe in February 2025, with donors including businessman, producer and comic Byron Allen. The effort, which is approaching $125,000 in pledges, was originally aimed at helping pay for his care; now it will “help provide stability for Christina and begin building a college fund for Everest — something Alex would have wanted more than anything.”
“I can’t even drive myself to auditions. … Everything I worked for, it’s like, two weeks. Two f— weeks, man. It’s all gone,” he told Nguyen on “The Vietnamese.”
“It was gonna be a good year,” Duong continued as he broke down in tears. “ I knew it was a rough one, because superstition, I’m a Rat, this is the Year of the Snake, it was gonna be a rough one, but … can I just have a cool year where I work? I just want a cool year where I work and I earn a little money and I can take care of my family.”
Being a road comic moves “so fast,” he said, and it’s something a person does solo. “What do I do now?” From the nose down, Duong said, his whole body was fine. But he felt helpless.
“The doctors — you know, we’re in 2025. Hopefully they’re going to take some swings,” he said. “I’ve been taking swings my whole frigging life.”
The mass behind his eyeball grew into his nasal cavity and the side of his neck, he told The Times. Extremely risky orbital reconstruction surgery was a possibility, along with a donor nerve, or a full donor eye. He didn’t know if he would ever recover his sight.
Doctors told him that for the first time in his life, he had to stop helping others and focus on helping himself. “It’s the most maddening thing,” he told Nguyen. An accident with a cup of coffee in February 2025 morning had him feeling like he should check into a psych facility. “I’m not safe around anybody. I can’t even pass a cup of scalding hot coffee to my wife without spilling it on the dog. … I don’t trust myself around anybody anymore.”
But Duong still had his sense of humor, he told Nguyen, and the support of his friends and family.
“Comedians always have each other’s backs when times are s—,” he told The Times last year. “We know how hard it is to pine and struggle and scrape by in this lifestyle, just so we can do these jokes and keep improving. It’s a beautiful thing to see in this world; it really is.”
He added: “I don’t want to be strong! I just want to go tell my d— jokes, make people laugh and hang out with my family.”
After her husband’s death, Christina Duong wrote on Facebook, “Through it all, he kept a smile on his face and always reassured us that he would be okay. He loved Everest so deeply. Even in moments of delirium, he remembered her and stayed calm for her. He was such a strong fighter, but this past week was simply too much for his body to bear. I find comfort in knowing he is no longer in pain. He passed peacefully with us by his side. I will never forget that moment.”
He was alert enough the night before his death to say goodbye to his daughter.
A memorial service will be held at noon on April 17 at Hollywood Forever Cemetery, according to an update on his GoFundMe, with “all who knew and loved Alex … welcome to come together to celebrate his life, his light, and the incredible impact he had on so many.”
“Thank you for the outpouring love and support during this difficult time,” Christina Duong wrote on Facebook. “Please keep our family in your prayers. I love you so much, Alex. Until we meet again.”
Freelance writer Julie Seabaugh contributed to this report.
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