Joel Kim Booster on Stand-Up, ‘Fire Island’ and More
The Last Laugh
The Daily Beast
4.6 • 661 Ratings
🗓️ 24 June 2022
⏱️ 49 minutes
🧾️ Download transcript
Summary
Joel Kim Booster likes to play the “hot idiot” on stage. But as you will quickly learn by listening to this episode, he is actually quite insightful when it comes to the unique challenges he has faced on his path to becoming one of the funniest young comedians working today. In this conversation, the writer and star of Hulu’s ‘Fire Island’—previously titled ‘Trip’—opens up about growing up with his adoptive Evangelical Christian family, how he gave up self-deprecation to embrace over-confidence and why there hasn’t been a gay male stand-up comedy superstar on the level of Ellen DeGeneres, Wanda Sykes or Tig Notaro.
This episode was originally published on June 1st, 2021.
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Transcript
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| 0:00.0 | This is the Last Laugh. |
| 0:07.0 | I'm Matt Wilstein from The Daily Beast and welcome to the summer of Joel Kim Booster. |
| 0:13.0 | You may have noticed that Joel, who I talked to for this podcast just about a year ago, |
| 0:18.0 | has been having a ridiculous month of June. |
| 0:21.4 | First, his movie Fire Island, which he wrote and co-stars in with S&L's Bowen Yang, |
| 0:26.9 | premiered to rave reviews on Hulu. |
| 0:29.8 | Then, earlier this week, his first hour-long stand-up special, Psychosexual, dropped on Netflix. |
| 0:35.9 | And today is the premiere of Lute, a new Apple TV Plus show he's |
| 0:39.9 | co-starring in with Maya Rudolph and two-time last laugh guest Ron Funches. When we talked last |
| 0:46.1 | June, all of this was still on the horizon for Joel, who at that point had just learned that |
| 0:51.1 | his movie had found a new home at Hulu after the demise of Quibi. |
| 0:56.1 | We talked all about his very unique upbringing, the development of his quote, |
| 1:00.7 | hot idiot persona, and so much more. So if you have joined the bandwagon since it first aired, |
| 1:07.3 | this one's for you. Here's my conversation with Joel Kim Booster. So yeah, have you been able to |
| 1:14.5 | do much stand-up in recent weeks, months? You know, it's only starting to come back for me now. I've |
| 1:21.5 | done a couple of outdoor shows over the last month or so, and it's been good. I mean, it's been wild. It's, I feel a little bit |
| 1:28.5 | bad for the audiences. I feel like they're, they're paying money to watch me, uh, learn how to do |
| 1:32.7 | this again. But, um, I think everybody's just happy to be at a show in general. So it works out for |
| 1:38.6 | both people. But I'm headlining at the Irvine Improv for the first time. It'll be my first headlining set in over a year, |
| 1:45.6 | well over a year at this point. And so I'm excited and I'm very nervous about that. Yeah. I mean, |
| 1:52.0 | it's crazy just how upended stand-up has been, you know, because I think most stand-ups who I talk to, |
| 1:59.1 | it's like, you know, you have to, you have to do it on such a consistent |
... |
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