The comedian Youngmi Mayer didn’t mean to bring a cockroach into a downtown Manhattan food hall.
And maybe she didn’t. But when one scampered across her body, under the table and out into the wild, she just assumed, in an assuredly self-deprecating way, that she was its host. “I’m like 99 percent sure that it was in my coat the whole time,” she said. “My apartment is so cockroach infested that they’re like my pets now. I mean, I try to clean, but they just won’t go away,” especially after construction in front of her Chinatown building unloosed them. “I’ve given up. They’re hanging out with me now. They’re coming to my interviews.”
Later, she named him Herman and called him her “emotional support cockroach.”
Mayer is not easily embarrassed; she traffics in dispelling shame. She has built a following on TikTok and Instagram with unfiltered posts, often about her Korean American identity, in character as what she calls “the messy bitch that loves drama.”
She riffs — mercilessly, often in subtitled Korean — about gender standards, race and class, and frequently satirizes the hierarchies and clueless customers of the Asian dining scene, for which she had a ringside seat as an owner of the hotshot restaurant Mission Chinese, with the chef Danny Bowien, her ex-husband. She is also equally liable to weep for two minutes about a sweet old sandwich delivery guy.
As a podcast host, most notably with the series “Feeling Asian,” where she and the comedian Brian Park interviewed Asian American artists, she has addressed emotional health frankly and inspired a community of listeners (and podcasters) to do the same. Now she has another platform, with “I’m Laughing Because I’m Crying,” a memoir published this month by Little, Brown. It’s less about jokes and more about unpacking generational trauma. But for Mayer that, too, is foundational for comedy.
“As an adult I have had to curb my humor in social situations because other people have told me it’s inappropriate,” she writes in the memoir. “I don’t know how to explain to them that I come from the strongest people, who have been through the worst of humanity, and the jokes were what made it possible for us to continue.”
Mayer, who will turn 40 in December, grew up in Korea and Saipan, the capital of the Northern Mariana Islands, with a Korean mother and an American father. It was a tumultuous upbringing, marked by dips into poverty. She moved to San Francisco, alone, when she was 20, and was married to Bowien by 23. She started in standup only about six years ago, and racked up fans like Margaret Cho, the pioneering comic.
“She just hits me in such a tender place — as a woman, as a Korean American,” said Cho, who put her into the performance roster at Joe’s Pub, where Cho is the vanguard artist-in-residence through next year. “She just has such precision in hitting certain things that just make me want to scream, laugh and also cry at the same time.”
The title of both Mayer’s book and the name of her latest podcast (“Hairy Butthole”) refer to a saying she heard growing up: that if you laugh while crying, hair grows out of your — you get it.
In her memoir, she describes her own anatomy, the hirsute traits of her whiteness somehow proving a nonsensical Korean adage. Laughing while crying felt like the only honest response, especially when her memoir takes an expansive view, tracing family dysfunction to colonial horrors. Some of the most harrowing stories that Mayer remembered from childhood, she recorded her mother retelling. Describing them to me, she wept. “I really wish that cockroach came out now,” she said. “That would be really funny.”
She is confessional but not maudlin. Though she details her parents’ physical and emotional abuse in the book, and she worries about their reaction to it, she also defends them. “They are good people, and I still talk to them,” she said. “I love them very much.”
Feeling like an outsider was her animating force, though. “There is no biracial community made up of biracials speaking their own biracial language in every major city like there are for other ethnic groups,” she writes. “We just have to hang with the Koreans, or pretend we love white-water rafting with the whites.”
The writer Alexander Chee, who also grew up in Korea and the United States, called her “fearless,” especially in how directly she addressed the rigidity and misogyny of Korean — or American — culture.
Mayer’s humor, he added, struck him as particularly homegrown. “One thing I don’t think a lot of people know about Koreans is they love making fun of each other,” he said, “whether it’s your family laughing at you, or your friends.”
When Mayer is “roasting some Korean auntie who is at the Korean restaurant in the U.S. and is complaining about how expensive everything is,” he said, laughing at the impression, “that is a deeply Korean-based sense of humor.” (“I taught myself to cook Korean food, because it was so [expletive] expensive in the U.S.,” he added.)
Offstage and offscreen, Mayer is more soft-spoken and reserved, save for her frequently Technicolor hair, long gem-encrusted nails and her wardrobe of hot pink tennis skirts. She is not busting out one-liners, but her intimates “would say she’s the funniest person they know,” said Bowien, with whom she is still close. Even though she didn’t start comedy professionally until after their 12-year relationship, “I always thought she was so hilarious.” (They divorced in 2018, splitting before Mission Chinese was awash in controversy over labor practices. The restaurant has lately been reborn as a pop-up and hosted her book party.)
In the heyday of Mission Chinese, which started in San Francisco and became an influential sensation in New York, they were a downtown and culinary “It” couple, traveling the world for exquisite tasting menus. Mayer now has more of a Bud Light palate, she said. It’s not that she doesn’t understand rarefied food: ”I went all the way around — I know too much.”
But she had an impact. “Youngmi has always been a good sounding board and also helped me stay levelheaded through the ups and the downs,” Bowien said. He grew up in Oklahoma, the adopted Korean son of a white family, and visited Korea for the first time with Mayer. “She taught me so much about myself as well, and my culture,” he said.
Mayer is also characteristically candid about money: She is still in debt — “a terrifying amount of debt,” she writes in the book — from the restaurant. With that debt, she is poorer now than when she was a waitress in her early 20s.
But, though she has faced hateful comments and threats, she has no interest in softening her perspective for mass appeal. For her book tour, which sold out dates on the West Coast, she was inspired by pansori, a traditional style of Korean musical storytelling, sometimes accompanying herself with a large drum. “Obviously, if you do create something, most people are not going to love it,” she said. “But there are people who do like this, and I like doing it, so I’ll just keep doing it.”
Her life as a single mom is also ripe. “I have had one abortion — but I’ve also had one child, and one of those things I deeply regret,” she said at a show a few months ago. “And I won’t tell you which one, so you can’t tell how you feel about me. But I’ve never had to take my abortion to a Minion movie.”
Mayer and Bowien’s 10-year-old son appears frequently in her social media feed, and her devotion to him is evident: A popular recent TikTok has her in tears about finding “a cool rock” and “a really good stick” — the fleeting essence of boyhood — in his backpack.
This was a sweeter kind of laughing while crying. But Mayer has never hesitated, she said, to delve into painful subjects. “I still don’t understand the detriment of talking about that openly,” she said. There was the risk of embarrassment, sure. But what she found when she disclosed her stumbles and fails was that other people had them too.
“It makes me feel like I’m not alone and that I’m not crazy,” she says in the book. “Well, I am crazy, but so are a bunch of other people.”
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