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At the beginning of his new Netflix stand-up special Funny Garden, Aaron Chen introduces himself to the New York crowd: “You don’t have this combo. Guys that look like this and sound like this.”
It’s true: Australian Chinese stand-up comedians are very hard to come by in the US. But New York City is where Chen lives these days, having left Sydney nearly three years ago.
Chen living overseas is also the reason he won’t be back for the new season of the wildly popular Guy Montgomery’s Guy Mont Spelling Bee later this month, having been replaced by Sam Campbell. “It was such a sweet gig, but it was time to give it to someone else,” says Chen. “Sam Campbell is so funny and suited to this, I think he will bring many other dimensions to the role. Sam and Guy are so funny, they’re the best comedians for me.”
Aaron Chen performing in his new Netflix stand-up special Funny Garden.
New York is also one of the reasons – says Kitty Flanagan, anyway – that there is no new Fisk in the works. “I think I’ve been used as a scapegoat by Kitty,” says Chen, who last year won the Silver Logie for best lead actor in a comedy for his role as awkward webmaster George in the ABC comedy. “She doesn’t want to answer the question. I think there’s many factors beyond my schedule determining if there will be a season four.”
Instead, the 30-year-old has been touring the US and the UK solo, and this week sets off around the US again as support for Emmy Award-winning comedian Ali Wong.
Funny Garden – “I love ‘garden’ as a metaphor for things, how things come about organically and so on. And I wanted to take that approach with doing comedy” – is a culmination of his work over the last few years.
It’s a delightful and assured 45-minute set in his signature low-key style that takes in everything from family stuff (his wife and dad), to the rise of overnight oats and life in NYC. It shows why Chen has become a hit – the special is already in Netflix’s Australian top 10 – and how he has grown from a 15-year-old doing stand-up in an inner-city Sydney pub to outraging football fans (and the ABC) with his half-time commentary during a Sydney FC v Liverpool match.
Guy Montgomery with his Spelling Bee sidekick Aaron Chen.
Netflix gave Chen $US200,000 to hire a production company and director, Australian Henry Stone, to make the show, with Chen also able to keep the box office profit.
“It’s very low risk for them [Netflix] because they were gonna buy Paramount for like one squillion dollars,” says Chen. “So $200,000 is not much for them. It’s low risk, but high return. And then I guess if they like working with you, or you did good numbers with them, then they would do it again with you.”
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He adds: “I could have shot it on my iPhone selfie-style, but they would have probably got pissed off.”
The Netflix special is also an opportunity to go global. It’s how fellow Australian comedian Hannah Gadsby shot to critical fame off the back of Nanette in 2018 (Gadsby has now left Netflix, releasing their latest special, Woof!, independently on YouTube this year), and it’s also how Brit comedian Ricky Gervais has, depending on how you feel about “woke” culture, soured his reputation over a succession of divisive specials.
Chen, though, has no interest in changing his comedy for more clicks. For him, it’s about staying true to who he is.
“I’m always focusing on making it really funny and trying to do the best I can with writing jokes and stuff like that,” he says. “So I think I did the same thing with this. I just wanted it to be the best jokes that I had and survive out there for 45 minutes and publish it.”
Aaron Chen and Kitty Flanagan as George and Helen in the ABC comedy Fisk.
Learning to do stand-up at a “high level” was the reason Chen and his wife Esther moved to the US in August 2023. He had already won awards at the Melbourne comedy festival and released his own special, A Life in Questions: Wisdom School with Aaron Chen, on YouTube. The US gave him the opportunity to try out film (he stars in Ben Stiller’s upcoming pickleball comedy The Dink, opposite – unbelievably – John McEnroe and Andy Roddick), while Fisk’s popularity in the US gave him a small ready-made audience.
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“It was like starting from the low middle or the middle kind of area, and it’s great,” he says of NYC’s comedy pecking order. “The big advantage of New York is that you can get up and do comedy every single night, and multiple times a night, to good audiences. You can kind of do that in Sydney, but there’s not, there’s not enough venues to sustain you doing multiple shows, and there’s not enough audience going to shows.”
He is now a regular on the city’s club circuit, but says he hasn’t found its notoriously cut-throat audiences that intimidating.
“They’re really nice,” he says. “It’s a different environment. I mean, there’s a lot of growing and learning with it. At the start, I sped up a lot just to kind of feel like I was keeping up with the New York pace. But now I’m trying to make a concerted effort to slow down again, to maintain a bit of that original kind of pace.”
Aaron Chen’s top five comedy specials
Comedy Central Presents Mitch Hedberg (1999) Mitch Hedberg was my favourite comedian when I started to do comedy. The writing is immaculate, and the perspective is very different to anyone before or even after.
Chelsea Peretti: One of the Greats (2014) This one is so cheeky with the form, and how it cuts away to audience members is so funny to me.
Ali Wong: Baby Cobra (2016, Netflix) I didn’t know of Ali before the special, but it’s amazing, high-octane comedy, high laughs per minute, American club-comedy style.
Ronny Chieng: Asian Comedian Destroys America! (2019, Netflix) This is the trailblazer for guys from Australia or Asia. So funny and with no punches pulled. It was amazing to watch this for the first time.
John Cruckshank (2018) This is one of Australia’s best comedians and joke writers. I think about many jokes in this set all the time. Very underrated.
Was it difficult to believe in himself that way? To think, “I am enough” and not feel the need to change?
“That is very profound,” he says, laughing. “I think that being secure in it is important. Like, you can go on stage and be a bit fearful of the audience, which is natural to do, and then go too fast, or you’re trying to be too funny and stuff like that.
“But there is something to be said about letting them come to you a little bit, being secure in what you have to say.”
Funny Garden is now streaming on Netflix.
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