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While our federal government’s hell-bent on demonizing and terrorizing immigrants, it’s important to note that many of the country’s most talented comedians were born in other nations. One glittering example is Bernice Ye, a Wuhan, China, native who kick-started her comedy career in Seattle in 2018. Now, anyone aspiring to make a living telling jokes in China has as much chance of succeeding as Felonious Dump has of winning a Nobel Peace Prize. So, Ye’s quick ascent to performing at several US comedy festivals and accruing millions of social-media views is remarkable.
After earning computer science degrees from Peking University and Purdue University, Ye worked at Microsoft and Hulu. She excelled there, but lacked the passion to advance and also felt creatively unfulfilled. At Hulu, she often had to give speeches but experienced discomfort doing so. Sessions with an executive coach and Toastmasters led to Ye finding and developing her public speaking and humor muscles.
In her act, Ye can take a subject as dry as the myriad tones in the Chinese tongue and make it very juicy indeed. And the way she says “cocky muthafucka” will impel you to put the phrase on a loop in your brain. Certainly, some of what spices up Ye’s work are her ESL accent and martial-arts moves, but what takes it to the next level are the hilariously clever ways she reveals this crazy country’s absurdities from an outsider’s perspective. And practicing tae kwon do has given her an alpha-female demeanor that adds oomph to her punch lines.
Ye got into tae kwon do during COVID; she was the only woman in a class of teenage boys. Being from Wuhan, Ye felt that Americans would irrationally blame her for the pandemic. “All the dignity that I lost in comedy, I found it back in martial arts,” she quipped.
Ye credits the Seattle comedy scene for helping her to build confidence, but she now operates out of LA. “Now I realize that Seattle is a much more friendly environment for you to get better, because comics have more opportunity to do longer stage times in front of real audiences,” she says. “Also, Seattle has a good community to support minorities, POC, BIPOC, and women.”
On the other hand, because Seattle’s comedy ecosphere is relatively small, Ye notes, one dud open mic set can tarnish a rep. She’s found LA’s to be more amenable to risk-taking. Speaking of which, Ye has added rapping to her repertoire and has converted five jokes into songs, with help from producer Cole Connor.
It began with Ye’s crowd-favorite bit “Asian Chicken Salad.” “It’s only because I got bored telling the joke. One day, I was listening to Macklemore’s ‘Downtown.’ I said, you know what? I’m just going to tie the jokes to the beat. This is so much more fun.” She also drew inspiration from musically inclined comics Bo Burnham and Dylan Adler and musical parodist “Weird Al” Yankovic. At Here-After, Ye will bust out her new single, “From Wuhan to the USA,” with its infectious chorus “Wuhan Clan ain’t nothing to duck with.”
Though Ye is a distinctive presence in American comedy and tells stories specific to her unusual trajectory, she strives for universality. “I found many people who relate to to my jokes, they can come from Europe, they can [be] another immigrant, they could be in the middle of America. I have performed in rural Washington [to] mostly elderly, white people. No matter how different you look, I want to see the human part of us.”
During this fraught time for immigrants in America, Ye’s observations can humanize people whom tr*mp and his goons nefariously otherize. We’re not quite as oppressive as the Chinese government, who could blacklist Ye or hold her parents hostage if she were to joke about its policies under her legal name. But in her sets, Ye focuses on human connections and emotions, leaving politics for her social media posts.
Ye admits that learning a new language was hard because she’s dyslexic. “But sometimes the mix-up turns into a really interesting association of words and subjects, and the punch lines write themselves. [Speaking English] gave me a chance to rewire my personality.”
Bernice Ye performs October 10 at Here-After, 7:00 pm & 9:00 pm, 21+.