Eunji Kim

Eunji Kim performs from a place of deep, unapologetic fatigue. She holds the microphone like she wishes she could sit down, delivering grim premises before pausing to let the room catch up. She builds bits around the exhaustion of adult life, undercutting her own status at every turn. In one routine, she interrupts a story about doing drugs in a public bathroom to point out that her companion doesn’t need to brag about a psychology degree while they are sniffing powder off the same house key.

She is a fixture of the Chicago scene, anchoring club lineups at The Lincoln Lodge while mounting solo runs at Steppenwolf. Her past work as a senior writer for Cards Against Humanity makes sense of her stage persona. She has a sharp radar for hypocrisy and a complete willingness to look terrible in her own anecdotes.

Kim uses her background as a Korean immigrant to bypass the polite rules of progressive culture. She will patiently describe her twenty-something friends earnestly dissecting generational trauma, then pivot to her own mother, who identifies Kim’s friends entirely by their ethnicity and their worst physical flaw. She leans into playing a disappointment, explaining that she defeated the model minority stereotype simply by smoking weed instead of studying.