27-05-2025
All jokes aside, Atsuko Okatsuka gets serious about navigating cultural identities and the comedy industry
Above Atsuko Okatsuka (Photo: Tatler Hong Kong)
For instance, while she doesn't claim to be a diversity champion, she never shies away from serious, heavy topics such as racial stereotyping. And despite her iconic bowl cut hairstyle being a nod to the often-mocked hairstyle stereotypically associated with Asian kids, she wears it proudly. She calls it her 'brand', and tells Tatler , 'I'll have to sell all the T-shirts that have my bowl cut on it first, and then I can grow it out.' Not that she intends to go all Rapunzel. 'You gotta keep growing as an artist,' she says cheekily, 'so that could mean a bigger bowl cut. Maybe it's two or three times the size; maybe it's a different colour.'
Her jokes are also celebrated for wittily and blithely pointing out the absurdity of social phenomena. In Father , she ridicules her teenage experience as a cheerleader, a role that's widely considered glamorous or desirable but one which she considers somewhat pointless. 'We're just there providing vibes, trying desperately not to get found out that we could easily be replaced with nothing at all, because cheerleading is the only sport where you're supporting another sport,' she says in the show.
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Above Atsuko Okatsuka (Photo: Tatler Hong Kong)
Above Atsuko Okatsuka (Photo: Tatler Hong Kong)
While she's obviously found success in her career, she boldly points out that the goal 'is not to get any [cheap] laughs. People get confused about the art of stand-up comedy. It's very important to think about why people laugh at your jokes,' she says. 'If you go on stage and you keep farting, people will eventually laugh. But why are they laughing? Is it because they're uncomfortable and they don't know how else to react? If you say something racist onstage and people laugh, is it because they're scared and they're weirded out? That doesn't mean you've succeeded. I wish this [approach would] change in the industry, because then that's just chasing cheap laughs. These are not well-crafted laughs.'
Okatsuka got into comedy about 15 years ago, when a friend from church, who thought she had a sense of humour, gave her a DVD of Cho's stand-up show. She didn't necessarily relate to the jokes, which focused on second- or third-generation Asian American experiences and stereotypes, such as the classic Asian parents' dream for their children to be doctors and lawyers. But because of the hurdles they faced when they first arrived in the US, Okatsuka says, 'My mum's and grandma's priority was not, 'Hey, study and be a doctor.' My grandma was like, 'I'm just happy you're alive, OK?' The standards were lower because the circumstances were so wild.
Above Atsuko Okatsuka (Photo: Tatler Hong Kong)
Above Atsuko Okatsuka (Photo: Tatler Hong Kong)
'But I loved that I was watching a fellow Asian American woman performing. I had never seen stand-up comedy before. I did not know that was a job, in which you could stand up there alone and tell stories and jokes, and people would watch you the whole time and laugh and relate to you. You're not a band, a dancer or a whole movie with production. It's very simple but it's the most interesting art form to me.'
Career success aside, comedy has also helped Okatsuka work through personal hardship. 'It helps me process what's happening in real life and then spin it into a positive thing—not just for me but for my audiences too,' she says. 'Just even talking about my mum's mental illness, for example—instead of being helpless and letting it get me down, when my mum says something funny or silly, I'll be like, 'Oh, let me write that down.' Or I think of solutions: how do I make schizophrenia sound not so scary? Maybe we name it after rides at Disneyland. It helps normalise mental illness, like I say in my jokes. It's the only way I know how to cope with things. It's not necessarily a healthy thing, but making sad things funny is what I'm good at.'
Above Atsuko Okatsuka (Photo: Tatler Hong Kong)
In September 2023, she accepted Glass's invitation and recorded an episode of The American Life —which turned out to be the perfect chance for her to clear up her early life story. Around the time of the podcast, her father, still living in Japan, was recuperating from a stroke. 'It was kind of a wake-up call,' she says in the Glass interview. 'Am I really gonna never ask what happened with my move to the US?'
She went on a deep dive, even hiring translators for herself and her Mandarin-speaking grandmother, who lives 20 minutes away from her home in LA, and her Japanese-speaking father, whom she travelled to Japan to meet in a Tokyo hotel—she speaks only conversational Mandarin and Japanese. For the first time, through honest, lengthy, partly confrontational, partly joking conversations, she learnt how her parents met, lived together and divorced, and how her father and grandmother made tough decisions in her best interest.
Above Atsuko Okatsuka (Photo: Tatler Hong Kong)
Looking back, she feels it is stand-up comedy that leads her back to her roots, opens up difficult conversations for her and helps her cope with the repercussions of a complicated past. She hopes, through her craft, she can do the same for her audiences. 'Through my stand-up specials or live shows, I want to constantly be able to entertain people,' she says. '[But also,] I care about how other people feel. Being a stand-up comedian means that if I'm talking about something sad, I want to make sure the audience isn't sad for too long and that I save them from it quickly. They pay to come to a comedy show to escape; I want to take care of them.
'The world is very small. If something [sad or traumatic] has happened to you, most likely it could have happened to someone else too. At the heart of it, my message is you're not alone in this. Being an adult is hard, so you might as well have fun while [being one] and have a laugh at it, too.'
Credits
Photography: Kiu Ka Yee
Styling: SK Tang
