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Comedian Ronny Chieng is thankful he never got a job out of law school

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Comedian Ronny Chieng is thankful he never got a job out of law school

A note from Wild Card host Rachel Martin: When you’ve watched Ronny Chieng’s comedy, it becomes pretty clear he’s a guy who takes none of his success for granted. He knows life could have turned out differently. What were the odds that a twenty-something Chinese Malaysian guy trying to launch a comedy career after law school in Australia would make it big in America? Whatever the odds were, Ronny Chieng beat them to become one of the biggest names in comedy.

He’s been a regular correspondent on The Daily Show since 2015 and is now a rotating host. He absolutely crushes his role as Jimmy O. Yang’s best friend in the Hulu show Interior Chinatown. And he’s got his third Netflix comedy special out now called Ronny Chieng: Love to Hate It, which made me laugh so hard I started recommending it to anyone within earshot.

The comedy in his specials is rooted in personal experience and observation, but this one is especially so. From stories about the challenges and absurdity of IVF to his dad’s death, he weaves in and out of these intimate places in the most hilarious way possible.

Throw in some razor-sharp observations about masculinity and YouTube in the Trump era, and boom! You got yourself an epic comedic journey well worth the ride.

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The trailer for “Ronny Chieng: Speakeasy.”

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This Wild Card interview has been edited for length and clarity. Host Rachel Martin asks guests randomly selected questions from a deck of cards. Tap play above to listen to the full podcast, or read an excerpt below.

Question 1: How do you consciously try to emulate your parents?

Ronny Chieng: I don’t think anything is that impressive. [laughs]

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That’s how I mimic them because they’re not easily impressed by much — but in a good way. So, I think in that way I try to see reality the way they see it, where they’re like, “Oh yeah, this is not that big of a deal. This is not that big of an achievement.” [laughs]

Rachel Martin: I think that would be helpful in your line of work, actually, because there is the risk that things spiral and all of a sudden, you think you’re really awesome.

Chieng: Yeah, yeah. It keeps you working to pursue perfection, right? You never think you’ve achieved it, so it’s good.

Martin: Did that ever cut the other way for you growing up? Like, if you did a thing and you wanted them to be proud of you and they were like, “Hmm?”

Chieng: I don’t know. I don’t think I was that impressive a kid. I didn’t have that many great achievements anyway, so I don’t feel like they wronged me by not being impressed. So, no, I don’t. I was like, “Yeah.” I was like, “You’re right. It’s not that impressive.” [laughs]

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Martin: And do you find that people in your line of work are constantly seeking that kind of affirmation? Do you find yourself falling into that trap?

Chieng: You know, my line of work being stand-up comedy — undoubtedly, we seek affirmation through a crowd response to our jokes, right?

We are looking for a good reaction to a joke, specifically laughter. So, in that way our integrity is compromised.

But we don’t believe in our own marketing. Someone told me, “The best comics think that their material is bad.” And there’s something to that, I think. I don’t know any great comic who’s like, “Oh, my material is the best in the world,” you know?

You’re always looking at other comics and going, “Man, that guy’s really funny. I need to write a better bit,” you know? You never feel like you have the greatest joke in the world. You’re always impressed by someone else’s joke. That’s how I feel, anyway.

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Jimmy O. Yang (left) and Ronny Chieng (R) at the premiere of Hulu's "Interior Chinatown."

Jimmy O. Yang (left) and Ronny Chieng (R) at the premiere of Hulu’s “Interior Chinatown.”

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Valerie Macon/AFP

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Question 2: What was a disappointing experience that now feels like a blessing?

Chieng: I couldn’t get a job coming out of law school. My grades were too bad, and I couldn’t get hired. And everyone around me was getting jobs because I went to a very good law school, so everyone around me was these very hyper-competitive type-A people who were getting really good jobs at these big law firms. And I felt a little left out at the time.

But in hindsight, I’m like, “Oh man, I’m so glad I never got hired,” because I think it would have been more difficult for me to quit a job and do comedy. As it was, I just — I didn’t have anything to lose, so I could just do comedy. It wasn’t like I had to pick between comedy and a corporate job. I was just not smart enough like my wife. I went to law school with my wife and she’s like a genius. Her grades are amazing. She got all these job offers. But I couldn’t get a single one.

Martin: So, were your parents disappointed that that didn’t pan out for you?

Chieng: No, they weren’t because I never told them.

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Martin: What do you mean?

Chieng: I didn’t tell them I was doing comedy. They thought I was studying for the bar exam, which I was in fairness. But at that time, I was just doing comedy. And by the time they found out, it was almost too late.

Martin: Wait, that’s awesome. So you just led this separate life — assuming you were in a good enough place that when they found out, they weren’t traumatized. You’re like, “I’m a comedian — and I can pay my rent. So it’s okay?”

Chieng: Yeah. They only found out honestly when I got hired on The Daily Show.

Martin: Wow. Did they know what The Daily Show was?

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Chieng: No, they didn’t know what it was, but after I told them I got hired, they googled it, they found out all about it, they were like, “Oh, you know, this is an important show, this is a very famous show,” and I’m like, “Yeah, I know, I know.”

They kind of trained me to be like, you know, it’s just an opportunity. It doesn’t mean you’re good. [laughs] It just means you have a chance to do something cool, right? Like that’s what it was, so that’s what I took it for. And that’s really what the strength of being on The Daily Show is. Like, more so than fame or whatever, it’s like this opportunity to work with extremely talented people and really become better yourself. Because everyone at that show is so good at their jobs that you don’t want to be the weakest link. And so you lift your game. So, that’s why it’s the best job in comedy. It makes you a better writer, performer, comedian, satirist, you know? That show is — it’s like the Harvard Business School of comedy.

Ronny Chieng on “The Daily Show.”

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Question 3: How have your feelings about death changed over time?

Chieng: Oh, yeah. It’s become more real. It used to be this kind of conceptual abstract, right? And then it’s become very real the last couple of years, seeing it up close. It becoming more real was kind of frightening. I was studying Buddhism recently, and there was this very interesting concept that I’m going to butcher because I’m going to give you the Cliff Notes of it in, like, five seconds. But the idea was something like: we are a different person in every moment, anyway. Our thoughts are different. Our cellular makeup is different in every second, every moment. Meaning — we are different people in every second of every moment anyway. So, the concept of “me” doesn’t really exist because I’m constantly changing anyway.

And so when I die, it doesn’t matter because I never really existed. So that is kind of like the Buddhist answer — one of the Buddhist answers — to that.

Martin: I like that idea. Does that mean that when a person dies, you think that it’s just another transition, or are they gone?

Chieng: I think that, unfortunately, as a person observing someone dying, that person is gone. I’m just talking about me, personally — for me to come to terms with my own mortality. That’s how I view it anyway — that I never really existed. I’m different every moment, so if I go, that’s just another change, right? Dealing with other people, that’s tough. I think that requires a different concept.

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‘Stranger Things’ is over, but did they get the ending right? : Pop Culture Happy Hour

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‘Stranger Things’ is over, but did they get the ending right? : Pop Culture Happy Hour

Millie Bobby Brown in the final season of Stranger Things.

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After five seasons and almost ten years, the saga of Netflix’s Stranger Things has reached its end. In a two-hour finale, we found out what happened to our heroes (including Millie Bobby Brown and Finn Wolfhard) when they set out to battle the forces of evil. The final season had new faces and new revelations, along with moments of friendship and conflict among the folks we’ve known and loved since the night Will Byers (Noah Schnapp) first disappeared. But did it stick the landing?

To access bonus episodes and sponsor-free listening for Pop Culture Happy Hour, subscribe to Pop Culture Happy Hour+ at plus.npr.org/happy.

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JasonMartin Says Adin Ross Disrespecting Doechii Stops in 2026

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JasonMartin Says Adin Ross Disrespecting Doechii Stops in 2026

JasonMartin
Adin Ross Disrespecting Doechii …
Will Not Be Tolerated!!!

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‘Everything I knew burned down around me’: A journalist looks back on LA’s fires

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‘Everything I knew burned down around me’: A journalist looks back on LA’s fires

A firefighter works as homes burn during the Eaton fire in the Altadena area of Los Angeles County, Calif., on Jan. 7, 2025.

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Josh Edelson/AFP via Getty Images

On New Year’s Eve 2024, journalist Jacob Soboroff was sitting around a campfire with a friend when he made an offhand comment that would come back to haunt him: The last thing he wanted to do in the new year, Soboroff said, was cover a story that would require donning a fire-safe yellow suit.

Just one week later, Soboroff was dressed in the yellow suit, reporting live from a street corner in Los Angeles as fire tore through the Pacific Palisades, the community where he was raised.

“This was a place that I could navigate with my eyes closed,” Soboroff says of the neighborhood. “Every hallmark of my childhood I was watching carbonize in front of me. … There were firefighters there and first responders and other journalists there, but it was an extremely lonely, isolating experience to be standing there as everything I knew burned down around me in real time.”

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In his new book, Firestorm: The Great Los Angeles Fires and America’s New Age of Disaster, Soboroff offers a minute-by-minute account of the catastrophe, told through the voices of firefighters, evacuees, scientists and political leaders. He says covering the wildfires was the most important assignment he’s ever undertaken.

“The experience of doing this is something that I don’t wish on anybody, but in a way I wish everybody could experience,” he says. “It’s given me insane reverence for our colleagues in the local news community here, who, I think, definitionally were exercising a public service in the street-level journalism that they were doing and are still doing. … It was actually beautiful to watch because they are as much a first responder on a frontline as anybody else.”

Interview highlights

Firestorm, by Ben Soboroff

On the experience of reporting from the fires

You’re choking with the smoke. And I almost feel guilty describing it from my vantage point because the firefighters would say things to me like: “My eyeballs were burning. We were laying flat on our stomach in the middle of the concrete street because it was so hot, it was the only way that we could open the hoses full bore and try to save anything that we could.” …

I could feel the heat on the back of my neck as we stood in front of these houses that I remember as the houses that cars and people would line up in front of for the annual Fourth of July parade or the road race that we would run through town. Trees were on fire behind us — we were at risk of structures falling at any given minute. It was pretty surreal because this is a place I had spent so much time as a child and going back to as an adult. … I had no choice but to just open my mouth and say what I saw to the millions of people that were watching us around the country.

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On undocumented immigrants being central to rebuilding the city

These types of massive both humanitarian and natural disasters give us X-ray vision for a time into sort of the fissures that are underneath the surface in our society. And Los Angeles, in addition to being one of the most unequal cities between the rich and the poor, has more undocumented people than virtually any other city in the United States of America. Governor Newsom knew that with the policies of the incoming administration, some of the very people that would be responsible for the cleanup and the rebuilding of Los Angeles may end up in the crosshairs of national immigration policy. And I think that that was an understatement. …

Pablo Alvarado in the National Day Laborer Organizing Network said to me that often the first people into a disaster — the second responders after the first — are the day laborers. They went to Florida after Hurricane Andrew, to New Orleans after Katrina, and they’d be ready to go in Los Angeles. And I went out and I cleaned up Altadena and Pasadena with some of them in real time.

And only months later did this wide-scale immigration enforcement campaign begin … on the streets of LA as sort of the Petri dish, the guinea pig for expanding this across the country. And it’s not an exaggeration to say that the parking lots of Home Depots, where workers [were] looking to get involved in the rebuilding of Los Angeles, has been ground zero for that enforcement campaign.

On efforts to rebuild

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The pace is slow and it’s sort of a hopscotch of development. And I think for people who do come back, for people who can afford to come back, it’s going to be a long road ahead. You’re going to have half the houses on your street under construction for years to come. And for people that do inhabit those homes, it’s going to an isolating experience. But there’s an effort underway to rebuild. …

There’s also a lot of for-sale signs. And that’s the sad reality of this, is that there are people who, whether it’s that they can’t afford to come back … or that they just can’t stomach it, I think, sadly, a lot people are not going to be returning to their homes.

On what the Palisades and Altadena look like today

They both look like very big construction sites in a way. There are still some facades, some ruins of the more historic buildings in the Palisades. … But mostly it’s just empty lots. And in Altadena, the same thing. If you drive by the hardware store, the outside is still there. But it’s a patchwork of empty lots. Homes now under construction. And lots and lots of workers. … There are still a handful of people who are living in both the Palisades and in Altadena, but for the most part, these are communities where you’ve got workers going in during the day and coming out at night. …

We have designed this community to be one that’s in the crosshairs of a fire just like the one we experienced and that we will certainly, certainly experience again, because nobody’s packing it up and leaving Los Angeles. People may not return to their communities after they’ve lost their homes, but the ship has sailed on living in the wildland urban interface in the second largest city in the country.

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On seeing this story, personally, as his “most important assignment”

Jacob Soboroff is a correspondent for MS NOW, formerly MSNBC.

Jacob Soboroff is a correspondent for MS NOW, formerly MSNBC.

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Jason Frank Rothenberg/HarperCollins

I don’t think I realized at the time how badly I needed the connections that I made in the wake of the fire, both with the people who have lost homes and the firefighters, first responders who were out there, but also honestly with my own family, my immediate family, my wife and my kids, my mom and my dad and my siblings and myself. I think that this was a really hard year in LA, and I think in the wake of the fire, I was experiencing some level of despair as well. Then the ICE raids happened here and sort of turned our city upside down. And this book for me was just this amazing cathartic blessing of an opportunity to find community with people I don’t think I ever would have otherwise spent time with, and to reconnect with people who I hadn’t seen or heard from in forever.

Anna Bauman and Nico Wisler produced and edited this interview for broadcast. Bridget Bentz, Molly Seavy-Nesper and Beth Novey adapted it for the web.

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