TGIF FEATURE: It's hard to classify Charlyne Yi's humor

Charlyne Yi

IT'S DIFFICULT to describe Charlyne Yi. She's an actress (she played Dr. Park in House was featured in a handful of movies), she's a comedian (watch her interview below on Conan O'Brien), she's an impersonator (she impersonated a turtle in her audition tape for Saturday Night Live), and lately, she's a singer in a band (you be the judge.)

She just has a funny (as in strange) way of looking at the world. 

In an interview with Sheila Heti in The Believer, the Filipino American describes herself: 

"I tried theater in college, but I was such a bad actor. I would sincerely try to act how I was feeling, and people would start to laugh because I was so bad and so nervous. There would be a serious scene with a husband and wife arguing, and I’d be shaking. My teacher was saying that there’s a very fine line between drama and comedy, and I thought, He’s totally right. And I slowly realized, Oh, this is funny! I think that’s when I discovered that people were laughing at the real me in the awkward situation I was in, trying to act.

"The first time I performed was at a comedy audition. I pulled up the mic but it hit my mouth because it came too high, and it dropped and I couldn’t figure out the mic, and I couldn’t see anything on stage because of the lights. There were four judges there and I had to perform with them laughing, which made me even more uncomfortable, and I was just shaking and talking and they were laughing the whole time. Afterwards I was talking to one of the judges and he was like, “That was hilarious!” I was like, What are you talking about?

"Then I realized he couldn’t tell if I was joking or not about being nervous. He thought maybe it was an act, but he wasn’t sure. I thought, That’s so interesting—maybe I’ll master that. So I’d constantly try to do stuff like that in theater class once I learned that you can make people laugh in a way that they’re unsure of what they’re laughing at, and are slightly embarrassed that they’re laughing."

She is succeeding at that. You don't really know if she is putting on an act or if it is the real Yi. At any rate, she has managed to parlay her ambiguity into a number of roles. 

It's hard not to laugh when watching her when she is on screen, but I don't think she minds.

Right now, she says she's retired from acting. "Well… kind of. I always like to say that I retired, just because it sounds cool. But I always say I quit acting, and then I always go back to it like two years later, and I’m like, 'OK, I’ll say two lines on this movie.' And besides, I like starting rumors about myself as well, where half of it’s true and half of it’s not." 

She's kidding, right? 

Have a great weekend!

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