Comedy Central Stand-Up Presents

Joel Kim Booster builds his stage persona on an amusing contradiction: he carries himself like an arrogant, unattainable beauty while describing a childhood spent homeschooled by conservative white evangelicals in Illinois. The hook of the set is how early his identity formed in that insular bubble. As he puts it, he knew he was gay before he knew he was Asian, and when his parents eventually found his teenage diary, it read less like an emotional journal and more like an explicit listicle of secret hookups.

Taped at the Civic Theatre in New Orleans, the performance aired in October 2017 as part of the first season under the renamed Comedy Central Stand-Up Presents banner. Booster was writing for Billy on the Street at the time and had logged a late-night set on Conan, but the half-hour served as his calling card before releasing his debut album, Model Minority, later that fall.

Fresh off an eight-year relationship, he spends the back half of the set stumbling into his late twenties as a newly single gay man. He fields clumsy questions from white men who treat his South Korean birth as an open trivia round, explains why he only attends yoga classes to feel superior to strangers, and walks through the logistical headaches of modern sex.