The Colby Echo

Issue date: 3/9/07 Section: Arts & Entertainment

Media Credit: Molly Warren

Eliot Chang made two things very clear during his performance last Friday night in Page Commons: He's not your average Asian comic, and he's horny. Throughout the night, Chang assaulted his audience with mostly silly and mostly benign comedy that fluctuated between the provocative and the conventional, but consistently entertaining.

Taking the stage with fashionable tardiness, Chang cut a lean, tall and charismatic figure with gelled spikes in his hair and immediate charm. He started off strong, with a carpe diem sentiment that he would echo several times later in the event. "Enjoy life, because it's so damn short," Chang remarked. It's oftentimes grating when comics tell us how to live, but that's usually because they don't know how to package life advice into a joke. Chang did. "I want life to be like Spanish television," he said, describing how everything on Spanish TV is festive. Toothpaste? It's a party, it's a festival! Anyone who's ever watched a second of the seemingly 24-hour variety show that is Hispanic television responded with uproarious laughter.

Wearing a shirt that loudly read, "Asian Soul," Chang made his ethnic message quite clear, though you wouldn't be able to tell from the content of most of his jokes. Chang has gained a reputation as an activist for the Asian American community, and the way his views inflect his comedy is subtler than you expect. Halfway through the show he declared, "I know what a lot of you are thinking right now. When is he going to do some Asian jokes?" The show had indeed been lacking the typical Asian comic routines about crazy Asian parents or any ridiculous Asian accents. (There were small penis jokes, but those were in a greater context). "I want people to see me because I'm a good comic, not because I'm an Asian comic," Chang said. He ridiculed the idea that ethnicity could translate to a talent: "You don't go to a show and say, 'Oh man, that guy was Asian all over the place! He was Asian here and Asian there, he was Asian everywhere!" He took potshots at the hallowed American institution of political correctness, describing how whenever he gets in trouble, he just says "It's because I'm black, isn't it?" and people will be so afraid of dealing with the topic, they'll just run away. Chang managed to take issues of race seriously without demeaning his own ethnic identity or those of any others. His jokes were insightful and cutting, but ultimately good-spirited. That benignity sometimes de-fanged the cutting satire of his comedy, but for the most part worked to endear him to the crowd.

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