Behind Closed Doors with Roselle Bajet
Roselle Bajet is a stand-up comedian who will be performing in our upcoming Keepsake show, Unmute Yourself. Tickets are on sale now! In this interview, Roselle chats with Jay and Hailey about books, being an old soul, her writing process, comedy as a learned skill, and the perfection of Kacey Musgraves’ “Golden Hour.”
In this semi-weekly blog series, we post in-depth interviews that take you behind closed doors (or #BCD) with independent artists, many of whom have performed or will perform in a Keepsake show.
Hailey:
I had to basically beg you to participate in our upcoming show, “Unmute Yourself.” You joke that I have taken you out of retirement. I assume the pandemic was largely what forced you to “retire,” so can you tell us what you’ve been up to during the pandemic and how it has changed your comedy work? And do you plan to return to performing when that is safe again?
Roselle:
This is the final show, Hailey!
Hailey:
That would be a good advertisement!
Roselle:
This is my last act of life.
No, no. As you surmised, it was the pandemic, really, that put a halt to everything entertainment-wise. I don’t want to sound like a victim, but it really was a shut down of not just acting and comedy, but performing in general. There were no stages, and that’s primarily what I feed off of. Maybe I’m too old and too Silent Generation, but I just did not want to pivot to Zoom comedy. So I decided to focus on other things, primarily my writing.
This was something I always wanted to do. I was teaching myself screenwriting--I know everyone says that, but I genuinely was reading a ton of screenplays and guidebooks, and every morning I wrote a little bit. None of it was good! I would consider this my first year of really trying, even though I first had the idea to write my own screenplay in 2014, back when I was still in college. But I put that on the back-burner because that was when I started being more of a performer and exploring that route. I had always considered myself first and foremost a writer, and while I loved that and I think it’s the basis for everything that I do, I wanted to test and challenge myself by seeing if I could put that writing out there using everything that I have.
When you’re a writer, obviously you’re by yourself all day in a corner, and nobody really sees it (unless you put it on a blog, of course, or self-publish). And I think it was that immediacy, that audience interaction, that I came to love through performing.
Hailey:
And what else have you been up to in your daily pandemic life?
Roselle:
Besides writing, we can talk about my quarantine hobbies too. I love puzzles! I’m a huge Ravensburger fan now. And I’ve been just reading a lot, honestly. I haven’t had this much downtime to read in forever. So I’ve been reading those long Barnes & Noble classics that you should read but you don’t have the time to. I read War & Peace, Don Quixote, Bleak House by Charles Dickens. I read all those long tomes that I don’t think I’ll ever have the time to read again.
Hailey:
You’re just putting yourself through another college semester of research, reading, and writing.
Jay:
This is Roselle University.
Roselle:
I figure if I’m not going to live this year, I’ll find someone else’s experiences to live through.
Hailey:
For sure! I watched Martin Scorsese’s Netflix series with Fran Liebowitz, “Pretend It’s A City,” and Fran talks about that a lot. She’s such a reader, and she doesn’t understand why anyone would want to do anything else. Characters in books have more interesting lives than her!
Roselle:
Yeah! And for me, I like to rationalize it. For one, my acting teacher gets asked all the time, “how do you become a better actor?” She’s like, “just read!” Reading helps with understanding people’s interior lives a lot more than TV, or something that’s very passive.
This is turning into an educational TED Talk. But yeah, I love reading! It’s great.
Jay:
I really relate to you falling in love with writing first and then moving on to performing. I write songs, and for a while I never thought I’d sing them, and then I fell in love with performing later. You touched upon this, but when and why did comedy “begin” for you? Why stand-up in particular?
Roselle:
“Stand-up seemed terrifying, because hell no, I’m not going to stand there and tell jokes by myself!”
So we’ll start in 2014, because that’s the year that I think I was really taking comedy as a career seriously. Basically, I was researching the routes of the people who came before me. In my case, it’s Tina Fey, Amy Poehler, that whole cohort of Saturday Night Live (SNL) people.
I was researching them, hoping to copy what they did, and most of them came from the Upright Citizens Brigade Theatre (UCB). So I thought I would start there, with improv. Stand-up seemed terrifying, because hell no, I’m not going to stand there and tell jokes by myself! Improv gave some security, or that was what I thought.
So I started taking classes at UCB. First of all, I’m not naturally good at improv. I will admit this! That is the main reason I transitioned--because I had to--from improv to stand-up. I just realized that with improv, the team comes first, and I don’t want this to come across as I’m not a team player. But I’m not a team player! And it was harder for me to share the stage with other people.
I also think it was just the environment at UCB. This is just my experience, and I know plenty of people who loved their time there, but for me, I just felt it was so competitive, unnecessarily so. At the end of the day, we were all rolling around on pretend grass howling at the moon! I was like, guys, this is fucking improv, not brain surgery! I felt it was a bubble, where people like me--liberal arts grads who are just looking to be the next Tina Fey--and I didn’t vibe with that atmosphere. I remember thinking that I didn’t want to continue with that path, and that I didn’t see myself at SNL, for whatever reason. As much as that show was a formative learning experience, and I think every comedian will say that they grew up watching SNL, I didn’t see myself there as the end goal.
So that was when I was like, great. If it’s not improv, the only other option is this freaking stand-up, because what else is there?! And if it wasn’t clear, obviously there is also sketch, which is what SNL is, but I just didn’t gravitate toward it. I’m not the type of comedian who can play multiple different characters or pull off multiple impressions; I’m just me. And I have to own that.
Hailey:
So that was when you transitioned to stand-up?
Roselle:
“I knew I was funny, I just didn’t know how to translate that! And given the right tools, I knew I could do better. ”
Exactly. The first time I did stand-up, I truly was so bad. I can’t even believe how I just got up there after work thinking that if I rambled for five minutes, everyone would laugh. And that is sadly not what happened, and instead I got bitch-slapped with technique and craft and what-not. But it was good to have that failure so early on. With improv, I was okay. I wasn’t good, but I wasn’t bad, just mediocre. Whereas with stand-up, I sucked! I really was horrible. And that gave me some fire. In some ways, that whooped my ass. I knew I was funny, I just didn’t know how to translate that! And given the right tools, I knew I could do better.
My inner Asian tiger mom was yelling at me, I know you can do this!
So 2014 to 2016 was improv going into stand-up. Then 2016, coincidentally, that was the year I was seriously considering stand-up and also the year that Ali Wong exploded onto the stage. I swear to you that I was already starting to pivot, but when she came along, it just completely changed everything. Suddenly this was possible! Before her, the game-changer was Margaret Cho, who I think came out in 1993, when I was one year old. I didn’t really know her as a role model or mentor figure. When Ali Wong came around, I felt like I could really do this.
In 2017, I did my first special, “How Are You and Other Questions That Kill Me?” I was scared. As you already know, Hailey, I’m always scared. I’m always saying, “Hailey, I’m scared. Give me the easy questions, please.” So I tried to advertise this as a one-woman show as opposed to a stand-up comedy special, but as I was writing it, I realized I was formatting everything as jokes and waiting for a laugh. This was not a one-woman show. So I guess it came about because I really wanted to put something on its feet that was my own material, my own voice, and completely mine. I hadn’t really done that before.
I contacted a bunch of places to host the show, and it ended up at the Peoples Improv Theater (PIT). To this day, God bless the PIT. I just submitted my idea to this form they had online, and literally within a few days they were like, “okay, this sounds great! You just have to pay for your technician, it’s a $50 fee, and the stage is yours for an hour. Pick a date.” It was soooo easy! Not writing the show or performing or practicing it, but to have that door open, I think people don’t realize that if you ask the universe, the doors will open for you. I did not envision that the PIT, a legitimate theatre that’s one of the top comedy venues in the city, would just give me the time and all I had to do was sign the contract.
So I put on my first show. It was solid. Looking back, now that I’ve done my second show, my first show was okay. But the most important thing about it was that it got up there. I did it. And I can do it again! I realized that I needed time--what I called my fallow period--to rest my creative energies, because I just had nothing else. I had no other material left to perform or to talk about. And I think that’s something I’ve struggled with, but as I’ve gotten older and learned to be more patient, there’s just nothing I can do to accelerate that process of generating material and living my life.
Generally speaking, it takes me two years to come up with new stuff. So I’ve tried to stick to that. I had my second show in 2019, which was--what was that called?
Hailey:
“When You Know You Know and Other Things Idiots Say”
Roselle:
Yes! Thank you, Hailey.
Hailey:
You’re welcome. I’m here for you.
Roselle performing in Music + Mic Night at the Museum of Chinese in America. September 2019.
Photo by Hailey Savage.
Roselle:
So again, for that show, I invited my family and friends. I forgot to mention, in my first show, there were actually two strangers in the audience, just random civilians. I was like, I don’t care about anyone else’s reactions! I’m just worried about what you guys think! Your friends and family are going to laugh no matter what, it doesn’t even matter what the joke is, because they think it’s just funny that you’re doing this.
But my second show I think was 99% my friends and family. But I did feel a difference in the performance. I felt I had grown. I felt I had talked more in depth about things that mattered to me. Again, I think doing it more and more forces you to dive deep and confront things that I would never talk about in normal conversation. On stage, there is some kind of barrier that I put up that allows people to access my inner thoughts and feelings. It’s not exactly me, it’s my representative. And if I can think that way, it helps to protect me from criticisms or negative thoughts that inevitably come your way.
So we’re at 2019, and we’re in this fallow period where, again, I need to regroup and let the land just lie there, because if I’m going to do it again, I always want it to be better than before. If I don’t feel it’s better, I’m not going to do it.
Hailey:
“Comedy and performance are things that can be learned. So many people think that you have to be naturally funny, whatever the hell that means, but I think it’s something that you can get much better at over time.”
I love that you are such a student of comedy and of writing in general. Even when you thought your first stand-up experience was terrible, your reaction was that if you studied up, you could pass, you could improve.
Roselle:
At the end of the day, I’m a nerdy Asian girl. There is always a way to crack this SAT! I know it! There is a way to crack this damn test!
I didn’t even do that well on the SATs, but my point is that comedy and performance are things that can be learned. So many people think that you have to be naturally funny, whatever the hell that means, but I think it’s something that you can get much better at over time. You’re not either funny or not, you can work at it.
Hailey:
Jay and I were talking about how we both used to write fan fiction, so you’re in a safe space to be a nerd.
Roselle:
I didn’t even do that! But that’s wonderful.
Jay:
It’s also a great reminder for art in general, that it’s a craft you have to get better and better at.
Hailey:
You spoke about some of your influences already, but do you have other influences or people who were influential to you growing up? Anyone particularly influential to your work now?
Roselle:
I have to say, Chris Rock still is the OG to me. Chris Rock, and others who are similar to his style like Eddie Murphy and Leslie Jones, they command the stage. Half of the performance is in their energy and physicality, which I loved. I grew up as a bookish, nerdy writer in a corner, so to have that as part of my persona, to have someone who can explode, is so powerful. And it’s so fun! It’s fun to watch someone who can command a stage like that.
Aziz Ansari--he’s not one of my favorites, but I do like what he says--when he is asked what material he gravitates to, it is inevitably his own life experiences because nobody else is going to live them. He said something about wanting to be the kind of comic who is so specific they’re universal. I think I’m quoting Martin Scorsese too.
In 2018, there was a period of six months or so when I tried to do my own news-style videos, in the spirit of “Last Week Tonight with John Oliver.” John Oliver is another person who is so cerebral and dry and dour. I love that. I tried to copy him and do my own videos. I took them down, so you’ll hopefully never find them. They were bad, but I realized it was because my heart wasn’t in it and I didn’t have the passion for infotainment. I like watching “Weekend Update,” but I’m not the kind of person to write those kinds of jokes. It’s much more interesting to me, and inevitably to my audience, if I talk about myself.
Jay:
We’d love to hear about your writing process. Where, from whom, and how do you draw inspiration?
Roselle:
I don’t really consider this a process, but I write everyday. I write everything that happens to me, not even what’s funny. I write all those random asides because later on when I’m reading all this material that I have, a lot of the time I can make connections between things that maybe on the surface don’t seem like they’re related, but later on I can make them into a joke. For me, having a trove of written documents and parsing through it later on when it’s time for my next show, that’s the real tool.
“We all have our own tragedies and traumas, so I just wanted to be able to start that process of being able to talk about it, which I did in my second show. Stand-up is free therapy at the end of the day.”
For example, for my set that’s coming up for “Unmute Yourself,” I have so much crap that I’ve written over the course of the pandemic, and it’s on me now to go through all of these papers. It’s all editing, to make the joke as tight as possible, meaning I want as few words as necessary for the set-up and then for the punchline. Ultimately, the best kinds of jokes are one or two lines. I’m a storyteller as well, so I like to not necessarily have laughs in every line, and to have a good set-up, but it needs to be rewarded at the end with some kind of big laugh.
Hannah Gadsby, she’s wonderful and I love her material. In her first show, “Nanette,” I love that she didn’t feel like she had to conform to a four to six laughs per minute ratio, which is normally what you’re aiming for. She was more upfront, and she didn’t give a fuck if you laughed along the way. That’s not the traditional way to do stand-up, and a lot of people were criticizing her for that reason, but I liked that at the end the show felt very earnest. That gave me permission to do similar things with my second show.
We all have our own tragedies and traumas, so I just wanted to be able to start that process of being able to talk about it, which I did in my second show. Stand-up is free therapy at the end of the day.
So that’s how I write, and it’s usually a minute per page. So a 15-minute set needs at least 14 pages, 16 if no one’s laughing. Don’t worry, I have 16 for the Keepsake show!
Hailey:
That’s fascinating. I admittedly don’t know all that much about the comedic writing process, but I used to write short stories in college, and it’s the same idea. In short stories, you have to edit so much because every sentence counts, more than in a novel. And even though we weren’t necessarily going for a laugh at the end of the sentence, that same technique was instilled, because it’s important in short stories too to end with a punchline, and to then give space so that people have to live with it. That physical space on the page is the physical silence in a stand-up show. I haven’t thought about that comparison until now.
You mention that you’ve brought a lot of personal stories into your stand-up material, including trauma. In "When You Know, You Know…,” you talk about your father’s unexpected death, which happened when you were a teenager. You dedicated that show to him and explained that one of the reasons you do comedy is because you feel like when you make people laugh you can hear your dad’s laugh. If it’s okay, we’d love you to tell us a bit about your dad and about how your stand-up reminds you of him.
Roselle:
Well, first off, thank you for watching my show, as if it’s a real thing!
It’s funny because my dad didn’t make jokes, but he laughed at everything. His jokes were dad jokes. But he was so open-minded and laughed so easily, and that’s what I got from him. It helps now that I was able to find humor in pretty much everything. I think there’s some notion--maybe it’s true, to some extent--that it’s harder to make comedians laugh because they have much higher standards. But for me, I laugh at everything. I am so quick to laugh, and I think I got that from my dad.
I also think I got my appreciation for the arts and creativity from him. He loved music. He was the one who exposed me, from a very young age, to music spanning the decades, whether it was The Beatles and Frankie Valli in the ‘60s, or the Bee Gees and The Doobie Brothers in the ‘70s, Michael Jackson in the ‘80s, etc. And up until my dad passed away, he was a fan of boy bands! He genuinely loved Boyz II Men and The Backstreet Boys. So having that exposure to arts--he loved literature and reading--of course I would end up an artsy person.
He was a lawyer in his day job, and that too was kind of what I was leaning toward going into in school. I was a Political Science major, and at the time, I was leaning toward applying for law school, but I decided I just couldn’t do it to myself. So in so many ways, I was influenced by him. I probably haven’t even accounted for all of them.
And he would laugh with me. This was not good, but I was watching “Will & Grace” at nine or ten years old. That show was full of adult themes, obviously, but at ten years old I thought it was the funniest thing in the entire world. I loved it not just because of the material itself, but because I watched it with my dad, and I saw how much he loved it too. I won’t have that again, but it’s nice to think--whether you’re Catholic or not, and as you know, being Catholic is a huge theme in my work--that maybe he can hear me. And maybe he can see me, from wherever he is.
Jay:
Thank you for sharing those stories about your dad.
You’ve predominantly done stand-up, but you mentioned you’ve also taken some acting classes and you’re getting into screenwriting. Are there sides of performance other than stand-up--perhaps other types of comedy, theatre, or even TV/film acting--that you are drawn to or would want to explore in the future?
Roselle:
It’s funny, I just read this quote from Joan Rivers, who said, “Everyone forgets that comedians are actors. There's no question about it. A Robin Williams cannot say the same line every night for 40 weeks and make it sound fresh unless he's doing an acting job.” I took the most beginner acting class, but I realized that learning my lines and hitting the same marks in terms of emotion in my own material actually translates really well to acting. You have to do the same thing! You have the same objectives.
“I want to try everything, but at the same time, the world keeps telling me that I have to specialize [...] So it’s a constant struggle to reconcile the two, because I feel like I’m more of a generalist, and I feel like I’m good at some things and okay at other things, and combined I’m hoping that this is a unique combination.”
So I definitely would be open to TV or film, and I’ve seen that happen for pretty much every comedian. Bill Burr is primarily a stand-up comedian, and is another one of my favorite influences. I love him because he does not give a fuck, and he will say the most non politically correct things, but at the end of the day, you can tell that it comes from a good heart. He’s not a bad person. He has also gone into TV, but he still identifies primarily as a stand-up comedian.
I just recently learned that Taika Waititi, the director, used to do stand-up as well. And I watched his TED Talk--because you can tell from his movies like “Jojo Rabbit” that he’s a funny guy--and I learned that he did stand-up, and he’s not just a multihyphenate. He’s a thousand things! Actor, screenwriter, director, stand-up comedian, painter. And in his TED Talk he said, “I just wanted to try everything.” And honestly, that mentality is something that resonated deeply with me. It’s a double-edged sword, because I want to try everything, but at the same time, the world keeps telling me that I have to specialize, that I have to do this one thing if I ever want to be great at it. So it’s a constant struggle to reconcile the two, because I feel like I’m more of a generalist, and I feel like I’m good at some things and okay at other things, and combined I’m hoping that this is a unique combination.
Hailey:
I feel that so deeply, because I am also a generalist, and I get bored.
Roselle:
I get so bored!
Jay:
I don’t know if you’ve ever heard of Adam Savage? He’s an artist and he talks a lot about the benefits of being a generalist rather than going down a one-track path, and I really resonated with that and what you said.
Roselle:
I recommend the book Range by David Epstein.
Jay:
Yes! My boyfriend actually finished reading that a couple weeks ago and he really liked it. It’s on my list!
Roselle:
Oh, good! It’s all about being a generalist, and it makes you feel so much better about yourself.
Hailey:
What was the worst set you’ve ever done as a comedian? Tell us that story!
Roselle:
This is the moment that whooped my ass. I had just gotten off two years of improv and was wondering what to do next. So I signed up for this open mic, and it was not just comedy, there were also spoken word poets, singer/songwriters, etc. It was run by these two really nice, older white guys who were trying to jumpstart the artistic community in Queens. I got there after work, and was in my work clothes--nice blouse, fancy flats, whatever--and I’d spent the whole hour before just wanting to die. It really felt like an existential fear, like I couldn’t get up there because it would kill me.
“Failing is how you figure out what’s actually funny, as opposed to just thinking it in your head.”
They called my name and somehow I got up there. I don’t really remember what I talked about. It was probably a bunch of college stories, because I hadn’t lived life yet. And I just remember this middle-aged Black man who was laughing in a corner. He gave me my one laugh. It was so uproarious and boisterous that I knew it wasn’t because of the joke. It was because of how bad it was. And I thought to myself, this is my target audience.
Then I went off stage, and I felt in my heart that it was so bad it couldn’t get worse, so why not try again?
I don’t remember the next time I performed. I think my recovery time was a few months. But the good thing about doing stand-up repeatedly is that, even when you have those bad performances, the recovery time gets a lot faster. After that first bomb, maybe it took me two months before I wanted to try again, But then gradually, I could try again within a few weeks, and then even within one week. I think I dwell on it a lot less, because it’s all part of the process. Failing is how you figure out what’s actually funny, as opposed to just thinking it in your head. You have to try to get a laugh and not get one to know if something’s not funny.
Jay:
In your bio you write that you “barely maintain a social media presence.” I very much relate to that, because I have a love-hate--ultimately hate--relationship with my own social media. I’m curious what your relationship with social media and show promotion is? Is there any part of the business side of comedy that you enjoy, or is that a frustrating side of it for you?
Roselle:
The thing with me is I have never been a social media kind of a person, but I understand that it’s part of the business. You have to market yourself regularly so that your audience knows who you are, and so that they see that you’re putting out content, to ensure they keep following you. I would say that social media is one of the most difficult challenges I’ve encountered in my career, because it is honestly very hard for me to market myself. I don’t think I’m amazing. The only time I tell people to come to my show is when I think I am good, but that feeling rarely happens. I will never be the one who says, “Yeah, come to my show! It’s going to be worth your $10!” I’m more like, can it be free, so that your expectations are low?
I’m also very conscious that anything that is put online lives forever. That’s why I make sure that whatever is on there, I can say I’m proud of it, or I’m okay with it. I am not comfortable posting mediocre shit and having people see it for the rest of my life. I would much rather keep a very tight leash on what’s out there. I want people to hear my name and go, “Oh! She put out a video? I’m definitely going to watch it.” I don’t want a lukewarm reaction.
And again, this is me struggling. If you never put it out, nobody’s ever going to know who you are! So it’s a constant battle, and a constant balancing act.
This is not related to comedy, but I love Kacey Musgraves. She has been around the block for a decade, but I only just learned about her a few years ago. When I heard her album “Golden Hour,” I became a fan for life. I don’t even care what she puts out! I will wait until the end of my life for whatever new song that she puts out.
That is ultimately what I’m striving for. With comedy I watch, I’m either a huge fan from the outset, or if I’m not, it’s going to be an uphill battle to bring me in again as an audience member. Anthony Jeselnik--another white male comedian, but I think he’s hilarious because he’s such a good writer--his jokes are so tightly written, and when I watch his stand-up, I know that he’s going to have interesting wordplay and a different perspective on things. I’ve come to expect that from him, whereas I think some people are very quick to want to promote themselves when, I’ll quote Steve Martin here, “you want to get to a point where you’re undeniably good.” I just think that that takes time, and I’m so young. In my career anyway, I’m very young and very green.
That’s my way of rationalizing it. But I also just suck at Instagram and Facebook, so whatever. C’est la vie! Only you two know I’m funny!
Hailey:
That’s untrue. Hundreds of people have attended your shows. I know that for an actual fact, since I hosted a few of them.
I’m reading this book on artist management called How to Make It In the New Music Business by Ari Herstand, and he writes about there being only two kinds of artists: the Constant Creator and the I, Artist. The former puts out new material every week, or posts to TikTok three times a day, and the latter has one album out every ten years.
Roselle:
Yeah, and then everyone forgets who they are!
Hailey:
But not if you’re John Mayer, and you come back from going away to Montana for two years having completely re-branded yourself, because since “Continuum” you have fans for life! Like what you said about Kacey Musgraves. I don’t think you need to rationalize it, I think it’s just good to recognize which of those you are. Be authentic to yourself.
Roselle:
Thank you. Yeah, you’re not going to see me on TikTok! You’re already dragging me to Zoom.
Hailey:
So I want to talk about the fact that you’re a woman comedian. While we are kind of seeing more women comedians, and more women of color, finding success these days, it is still a male-dominated field, and particularly a straight white male dominated field. You have a joke about being at an open mic and sitting through hours of dick jokes so that you can have five minutes to perform. What is it like being a woman comedian? What are local comedy audiences like--are your crowds diverse, or majority male? And do you see any positive change occurring in diversifying the comedy world?
Roselle:
“With the man babies, I didn’t really feel it was competitive, because they’re just making dick jokes. How can that be competitive?”
Honestly, even though it is a white male dominated scene, I have not experienced open hostility. It is a boys’ club, but it isn’t as if the men tell you you can’t sit here. It’s not that kind of environment. If anything, it’s nice to not be treated differently. You know, the guys will make their dick jokes and sex jokes, and everyone’s really at the open mic for their own set. What I would say to someone who is just starting to enter the scene is that you can’t really expect the kind of supportive community that you would get from improv. With improv, I feel like the people are more naturally driven to meet together for practice or hang out after the show to get drinks. With stand-up, I didn’t really feel that kind of support. It wasn’t open hostility, but if you’re expecting camaraderie, it isn’t like that. You’re more like a lone wolf.
And the boys are boys in those kinds of environments. I was not uncomfortable, I guess because I was so desensitized to those kinds of jokes and it takes a lot for me to be offended. But is it a girly environment? No. So you have to get used to that. You can obviously address it in your own set, but the majority of comedians are going to keep making those kinds of jokes, the ones that might feel weird to a woman.
With the man babies, I didn’t really feel it was competitive, because they’re just making dick jokes. How can that be competitive? But oddly enough, with the ladies open mics that I did--and this is not universal--I felt it was slightly more competitive. I don’t know why, but I feel like when you are a female comedian, it automatically comes with that pressure of being an even better performer, because there are so few of us.
And I am an Asian woman, and it’s still not common to see that in the lower ranks. Literally, you have Ali Wong, and then you have legions of white and Black male comedians, with maybe one or two--I can think of a few, like this Iranian-American comedian, Mitra Jouhari, who is on the up and up, and Joel Kim Booster is also--so little pockets here and there of Asian comedians. But they’re so few and far between, so I’ve already gotten into the mindset of being a lone wolf.
With improv, I loved the community that I got from it. Acting too, I loved that community. With the open mics, you have to learn to be independent. Even if they don’t laugh, sometimes that’s not a good gauge of your material, because the audience is full of the other comedians, who are focused on their own material. They’re not even looking at you, they’re just thinking about their own timing and their own set. You have to figure those things out.
Hailey:
Part of why dick jokes wouldn’t be that funny to me is because I’ve heard them all. But then things like women’s mic nights could feel more competitive because now a joke about being a woman might be something you hear over and over again. Being a woman is no longer the niche joke in and of itself.
Building off that question, there are themes in your material that may be considered niche topics, mostly because they’re gender-specific. You talk a lot about the men you’ve been attracted to (and joke that they have often been either teachers or gay). You talk about the intersections of gender and race in your experiences. You talk about body image and female pleasure, and how that relates to shame and guilt, especially being raised Catholic. Obviously you use this nicher material because it’s honest, because these stories are part of your personal experience. How have audiences received this material? What kind of feedback do you get, and how do you prepare when you don’t always know what your audience will look like, and when there is a possibility that none of them will look like you?
“If I believe in the material enough for it to get to that stage, I’m not going to change it for anyone.”
Roselle:
I must say, I think this is something I could work on. With the audience, there is something called crowd work, where you will pick on different people in the crowd. Personally, I hate crowd work, and I really don’t like to do it. I’ll only do it if the set is dead in the water, then I’ll turn to the audience and call them out for not paying attention.
Hailey:
That makes me so uncomfortable!
Roselle:
It’s so uncomfortable! But that is the kind of audience work that sometimes I have to resort to, if it’s necessary. But in general, I think I prefer to focus on me and not filter or dilute it for different audiences. That being said, I’m definitely not going to play to kid-friendly audiences anytime soon. I’m not going to do a bar mitzvah, which I know Tiffany Haddish used to do. But if I believe in the material enough--and again, it goes through so many layers of editing that by the time I'm ready to put it out, I must believe in it 95-100%--for it to get to that stage, I’m not going to change it for anyone.
Of course it’s a balancing act, because some things can come across as insensitive or offensive, which is extremely rare but it happens. I will look back on material like that and realize that I can learn and change my ways, but for the most part if I really believe it, I don’t want to filter the material to ensure someone isn’t offended or to cater it to a certain type of person.
I am an Asian woman, and inevitably my jokes are going to be about Asian women. Sometimes it’s good, sometimes I’m going to make fun of us as a group, because I have a license to. I’m obviously not going to make fun of a group I’m not a part of. I can say this because I am.
Jay:
I remember reading an interview with Ali Wong. She had a similar question, and she said, “You can get away with a lot of things if you make it funny.”
Roselle:
Yeah! When I was doing a set about my One Direction jokes and how much I love One Direction, afterwards this young white guy said to me, “Your set was so relatable!” So you never know what will strike a chord with someone.
You can also look at someone and assume they’re going to be a fan because they’re an Asian woman, but they might not like your joke! My friend, who is an Asian woman, doesn’t like Ali Wong’s joke about jungle Asians. I think it’s so funny and so true! I’m Filipina, I am a jungle Asian, and I love that joke, but for my friend it’s not funny. You can just never tell!
Jay:
What can audiences expect from your set in the upcoming Keepsake House show?
Roselle:
I don’t want to give too much away, but I’m probably going to talk about the female body, Asian hate crimes of late, and my own experiences trying to stay sane in quarantine. If there is anyone who has not gone insane during this experience, I would like to learn your ways.
Hailey:
I’m excited for all the Don Quixote jokes that you’re going to make.
Roselle:
The windmills!
Roselle will perform in Keepsake’s first show, “Unmute Yourself,” airing live on Zoom Sunday, March 28. Buy tickets now!
Poster by Jeff Deng.
Jay:
And the last question! At Keepsake House, we talk a lot about the magic in live shows and the communities they help create, almost like every live performance is itself a keepsake that you cherish from a whole house of life experiences. Tell us about your most memorable or fulfilling live performance, the one you would grab first in a fire.
Roselle:
I would keep forever the memory of my second show, “When You Know You Know…” I feel like that was a combination of everything I had been working on--improv, acting, stand-up, and writing obviously--that gave me the performance of my life. That was the pinnacle, and now the hard part is to keep going and top that. It seems like an impossible task.
But, you know, if Kacey Musgraves is coming up with something new to top “Golden Hour,” then I can do it too.
Hailey:
I feel like she’ll need a lot of mushrooms to top that.
Roselle:
I don’t know how you’re going to top “Golden Hour.”
Hailey:
Yeah, or “Hamilton,” how do you top that? Good luck, Lin! You’ve done nothing since then.
Roselle:
Yup! Yup, yup, yup.
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