Truth is? Most standup is bullshit. Of course it is! The idea of taking a real feeling or a real scenario and creating a fake story with a beginning/middle/end is literally the gig. You pull from every part of you to try and make it genuine, but its usually not real.

Standup also choose the stories they tell. I’m Filipino, so as a stand up comedian, I talk about my experiences. But as middle class Filipino growing up in SoCal, I haven’t experienced the racism and discrimination that my past generations (or fellow Filipinos) have experienced. So I can’t just invent or take inspiration from other experiences of discrimination, and pass them off as my own.

That’s always been my standard personally as a comedian, because it also intersects with my political identity. Creating that type of distrust with an audience would hurt myself and my community, and my own personal success would not be worth that.