Model Minority

Joel Kim Booster spends much of his debut album daring the audience to find him unlikable. Rather than offering educational storytelling, he leans hard into a vain, hyper-sexual stage persona designed to run roughshod over polite expectations. When he takes aim at newborn babies, he does not bother softening the blow; he just methodically lays out why he is objectively better looking than any infant.

Recorded over two nights in July 2017 at the Ars Nova Theatre in Manhattan, Model Minority arrived alongside a companion half-hour set for Comedy Central. Booster was already an ascendant name in New York stand-up, but the 53-minute record gave him the space to stitch his contradictory background together: adopted from South Korea, homeschooled by conservative white evangelicals in suburban Illinois, and cast out as a teenager after his parents found his diary.

He refuses to treat that history with reverence. The upbringing mostly serves as an origin story for bad habits, setting up routines on casual sex, Grindr etiquette, and the racial fetishes of white men who claim to prefer Asian partners.