Comedy: Ronnie Chieng “Goes Off” at the Knight Theater
Comedy: Ronnie Chieng “Goes Off” at the Knight Theater
Chieng's "Love to Hate It" tour stops in Charlotte and gets the Matt at the Movies treatment.
On Sunday, March 24, a full house at the Levine Center for the Arts’ Knight Theater welcomed comedian and actor Ronnie Chieng to the Queen City. His current hour of comedy, “The Love to Hate it Tour,” will likely be the basis for his third Netflix special, set to tape in a few months.
You may recognize Chieng from such hit films as Crazy Rich Asians, the horror comedy M3gan, or Marvel’s Shang-Chi and the Legend of the Ten Rings. Longtime fans will know him from his breakout gig working as a correspondent on Comedy Central’s The Daily Show, which he appeared on sporadically from 2015 to 2023.
At this point in his career, the New York City based comic has perfected his craft and is becoming one of the more well known faces in America’s comedy scene.
Chieng, of Malaysian Chinese descent, grew up in both Singapore and the United States before heading off to university in Australia. While in law school, he got the itch to perform and never looked back. His career brought him and his now wife to the States in 2015.
Chieng has a distinct lane: using his Asian ethnic background and intellect to showcase how insane our world has become through politics, generational divides, economic inequality, or something as simple as trying to get your parents to properly use the internet without causing another January 6th incident. His presence is commanding as he constantly seemed both annoyed and bewildered by the fabric of American culture (while loving it nonetheless).
Chieng’s ability to change tones, modulate energy levels, and artfully spin long stories are all skills that make him one of the best comedians I’ve seen perform live.
At this point in his career, the New York City based comic has perfected his craft and is becoming one of the more well known faces in America’s comedy scene.
This night was his first night playing the Queen City, but his energetic, intelligent, and aggressive wit was on full display. He was happy to have brought in as many white audience members as possible in his ultimate effort to become a real “crossover” mainstream star, before pointing out they were only there because their partner was Asian (got me there, Ronnie)!
Afterwards, he admonished his Asian audience for simply doing their “duty” of showing up and not buying enough tickets for him to do a second show in the city. Lastly, he genuinely wondered how any Latino or Black populations even knew about his show as his metadata showed virtually no overlap with his brand of comedy. His intro drew huge laughs and set the night off on the right course.
His hour set peeked into his personal life of the early steps of in vitro fertilization (IVF) with his wife. He lamented the expectations of raising a child without his Chinese parental instincts, ingrained in him by intergenerational trauma, bursting out at a moment's notice for any small discretion. He poked fun at his mother’s travels from Singapore to visit him in NYC, and her inability to comprehend the price of anything in the city (she felt every interaction was a scam to take her money).
Chieng finished the show talking about his dad, who had achieved the American dream before moving back to Singapore to live a simple life with his family before passing away. It was a very sweet and fitting end for the chaotic nature of his set.
Where the hour really shined was his meditation on what it means to love America. Chieng talked about how people say they will die for this country, but won’t do their math homework to become engineers (which the U.S. desperately lacks). He breaks down the rise of male improvement, and how after a few YouTube videos of learning proper exercise techniques, these viewers worked their way into Jordan Peterson echo chambers and inevitably stormed the Capitol building on January 6th.
Chieng dived into the micro and macro economic policies over the past fifty years that sold a fake bill of goods to Millennials, all the while the rich got richer. However, he was never preachy, smarmy, or overly political in any of his well crafted rants. Instead, Chieng came off as funny, annoyed, and extremely intelligent, and the crowd nodded their heads at his observations as much as they laughed. That’s a fine line to maneuver, but he did it with ease and confidence.
As the show ended, Chieng went into a full-blown rant over social media disinformation and the “Boomer” generation's inability to properly navigate technology. The pure disgust he carried through every joke was akin to a Braveheart pre-battle speech in which every younger attendee was howling with laughter (Editor’s Note: Matt turns 40 this month, so I don’t know who he thinks he’s fooling here). Chieng’s masterful rants were reminiscent of Bill Burr’s charismatic aggression mixed with Marc Maron’s thoughtful annoyance-at-the-world vibes.
While you may have missed him last week, you can be sure you’ll be seeing Ronny Chieng on TV shows, supporting movies roles, and on Netflix in the coming months. His talent is undeniable, and if you haven’t heard of him until today I highly recommend checking out his first Nextflix special, Asian Comedian Destroys America!, which is still available on the streaming service.
That’s another great show at Knight Theater at the Levine Center for the Arts in the books. I’ll be back soon with more movie coverage in the coming weeks as we pull out of the post Oscar lull.
Thanks for reading and see you next time at Matt at the Movies!