Years ago, one could name almost every American stand-up comic working. However, they were primarily white men and knew they had made it when they finally appeared on "The Tonight Show" starring Johnny Carson.
Today, comics are abound. In almost every town in the country, you can find a comedy club with all manner of purveyors of humor vying to make you laugh, the lifeblood of every comedian.
With all those comics running around, how do you know if they are funny? We don't know. Maybe it's like what Supreme Court Justice Potter Stewart once said about pornography: "I know it when I see it."
In a search for the key to humor, Wisconsin Public Radio's "BETA" was led to Atsuko Okatsuka. Variety has called her one of the top 10 comics to watch in 2022. Her HBO special is called "Atsuka Okatsuko: The Intruder."
"BETA" talked with Okatsuka about how she came up with the material for her show and where the title "The Intruder" came from.
"So, during the pandemic," she tells us, "my husband and I had an intruder come to our house three times in the same day. And that becomes the story structure of the special."
Three times a day meant a story in three acts, Okatsuka said. She returns to the intruder story throughout the hour, recounting what happened and how she finally got rid of him.
"...The way that I try to fend him off — or not try to fend him off — says a lot about me, like growing up with this under a layer of insecurity, not feeling like I belonged in various communities and being in the United States feeling like an outsider. I often felt like an intruder myself," Okatsuka said. "On top of that, there's a literal intruder. So It felt right that that would be the title."
"All of that was just like my upbringing. Everything led me to this moment of feeling threatened in my own home that I was afraid even to call my home for the longest time. Because in the special, I joke that I am just renting, so it's not my home," she continued.
With the story of the intruder as the backdrop, Okatsuka moves us through various topics about her life in this country as an immigrant, like being raised by her grandma, which Okatsuka said didn't help much with her social development.
"Her raising me, I think, gave me a different perspective as a young kid. I just saw more of the generational trauma. I was able to see it in my grandma," she said. "I could see how hard she worked and then how my mom couldn't work because she suffered from mental health issues. So I think emotionally, that made me very mature, very fast. But socially stunted because I was hanging out with someone 50 years older than me."
Okatsuka spent the first part of her life in this country as an immigrant lacking permanent legal status, but she didn't find out until she was 17.
She explained: "You can do a lot without having papers. So I like to normalize it by saying undocumented folks are just Americans without papers. They're able to go to public school. They're your friends. They're your neighbors. If they're able to, they work. And we all pay taxes.
"Inherently, because of it, we can go to the park, we can go to the library, and we can take public transportation. I didn't quite know what that status meant. I couldn't vote, drive, or do things like that. Of course, that required a Social Security number. But it did give me a sense of being an outsider. It affected how I tried to make friends because I was embarrassed by our living situation. We lived in a garage, so I wouldn't invite people over. But all in all, I was surprised at how much I could do like any other kid," Okatsuka said.
Whether talking about feeling awkward around teenagers, dealing with substantial generational gaps, or even fending off an intruder, Okatsuka finds a way to make her point and make people laugh.
She says that stand-up comedy is a service industry, so she must be funny.
"It's for the people, by the people," she said. "People paid for tickets to come to see you. People traveled to come to see you. So I think you should serve. And so that's what I mean by the service industry. It's an art form, you know, that is very raw and very personal."