For his second Netflix comedy special, Phil Wang finds the lighter side of navigating between his heritage and childhood growing up in Malaysia with the British side of his lineage and upbringing, all while becoming slightly more famous as he gets older.
The Gist: What are these trappings of minor fame, you may ask?
Already well-known and beloved by British TV viewers, Wang has gained a higher profile globally since releasing his proper Netflix debut, Philly Philly Wang Wang, in 2021. American audiences have seen him in Amy Schumer’s Hulu series, Life & Beth, and showcased on Netflix’s That’s My Time with David Letterman. And he has scored supporting roles in much bigger projects, too; among them: dancing on a table in Wonka after receiving chocolate from Timothée Chalamet, or playing a human scientist (VR name: Aristotle) in Netflix’s adaptation of 3 Body Problem.
Wang filmed this hour at London’s only candlelit theatre, the Sam Wanamaker Playhouse at Shakespeare’s Globe, where he cracked: “Who’d have thought, a dick joke in a Shakespearean theatre?”
What Comedy Specials Will It Remind You Of?: The other best-known English-speaking comedians from Malaysia are Ronny Chieng and Dr. Jason Leong, but Wang’s observational style is decidedly looser and more casual than theirs.
Memorable Jokes: Can the differences between British people and Chinese people all boil down to their prevailing attitudes toward reheating rice? Wang uses that gambit to get into not only cultural attitudes toward food in general, but also about arguments for and against eating certain animals, and where he fits within those debates.
Wang plays with the notion, too, of how his comedy fits within the traditions of Shakespeare (as in that previously referenced dick joke) as well as how filming at the Globe allows him to jibe Brits over their superstitious habit of saying “touch wood” (their version of our “knock on wood”) to allay their fears.
What’s got Wang worried? Not much, outside of the implications of a mistaken key fob, or how American pharmacies dole out ibuprofen in much larger quantities than the Brits would ever allow for sale, or how general audiences might sing along to all of the words at a Kendrick Lamar concert. On that last note, perhaps, Wang offers a helpful suggestion: Replacing any awkwardly offensive lyrics with a more friendly term that fits with the rhyme. For Wang, he chooses slippers. As in: “Yo, where my slippers at?” Which conveniently also more accurately describes his own personal lifestyle problems.
Perhaps even more emblematic of Wang and his humor is a bit in which he realizes the phonetic implications of the abbreviations for America and Britain, translating the US roughly as “yes” and the UK as “you ok?”
Our Take: Wang does wonder how that observational joke could have been laying around for more than 200 years before his discovery.
In case you haven’t yet discovered Wang, he’ll catch you up on his specific heritage, born in Stoke-on-Trent to a white lady from but raised in Borneo before returning to the UK at age 16. His experiences split between two completely different island lifestyles with fundamentally different attitudes toward news, medicine, and other customs.
He knows that his height at 6-foot-1 throws some people off, while his increasing fame means that as of now, he’s slightly more excited about being recognized than the person spotting him. Even if ultimately, Wang realizes that with recognition comes the responsibility of not doing or saying anything too foolish offstage, lest he get filmed surreptitiously and go viral for the wrong reasons. “So i have to be on my best behavior at all times now,” Wang tells us.
Not that his actual observations onstage or stories are all that outlandish. Although oddly enough, when Wang does veer into trickier territory, his vocal tone can briefly and roughly sound something like Jimmy Carr’s?
Regardless, or nevertheless, Wang also jokes that in comedy and memoir writing, he has learned in the process that he has been expected to do his own fact-checking. Which in the case of his worlds colliding, leads him to close with an extended dick joke about cultural stereotypes. And while comedy specials are not meant to be dick-measuring contests, this one does end with a bit about literally measuring his own.
Our Call: How does he size up? Wang jokes earlier in the hour that UK audiences tend to be so negative that the best compliment they know to give is: “That was quite good, actually.” Suer enough. STREAM IT.
Sean L. McCarthy works the comedy beat. He also podcasts half-hour episodes with comedians revealing origin stories: The Comic’s Comic Presents Last Things First.
