Recovering the TV career of Korean American comedian Johnny Yune

ABSTRACT

This article examines the late Korean American stand-up comedian Johnny Yune’s television career at NBC. Yune made his comedy debut on The Tonight Show starring Johnny Carson in 1978 and charmed the nation’s most beloved talk show host of that era. As a result, NBC signed Yune as the lead in three pilots over the next two years but his career on network television abruptly ended in 1980. Some of the factors that contributed to this end include the mystification of South Korea(ns) as a nation and identity, NBC’s struggle to compete against ABC and CBS, and systemic racism in the US. Yune’s stand-up routine was rooted in racialized and politicized self-deprecation which appealed to the dominant biases of mainstream (white) Americans in the late 1970s. With that said, given America’s hazy recollection of its involvement in the Korean War (1950–1953), Yune’s comedic material produced a memory in place of its forgottenness. This paper historicizes Yune’s transnational career as an actor, comedian, filmmaker, and talk show host in Los Angeles and Seoul, as well as his reception in America, which was impacted by the ‘cold’ war between the US and USSR.

KEYWORDS:

• Television
• Asian American
• Korean War
• race
• stand-up comedy

Disclosure statement

No potential conflict of interest was reported by the author(s).

Notes

1. Hereafter, any reference to ‘Korea’ will be of South Korea/Republic of Korea (ROK) unless specified.

2. Multiple sources in the Korean press cite that Yune appeared on The Tonight Show 34 times but, in my findings from the Johnny Carson Archive, I counted 12 appearances (Yoon 2020; Eun-byeol 2020; Kwak 2020).

3. With the exception of Korean names, all Korean words, including places, are transliterated in the McCune-Reischauer Romanization.

4. Park Chan-wook’s Oldboy (2003), one of the most recognized South Korean films in contemporary America’s popular consciousness, includes a scene in which the protagonist, Oh Dae-su (Choi Min-sik), cuts off his tongue with a pair of scissors, after the antagonist Lee Woo-jin (Yoo Ji-tae) accuses him of spreading rumors about his sister’s incestuous pregnancy that drives her to suicide – a scene that demonstrates both a lingual and physical (im)potency of masculinity.

5. Contemporary films like Lost in Translation (2003), The Hangover trilogy (2009–13), and The Interview (2014) contain examples of ridiculing Asian accents.

6. This verbal Oriental masquerade and cross-ethnic performance by Korean American actors endures in contemporary American cinema and television: Randall Park employs an ambiguous ‘Asian accent’ in his portrayal of Louis Huang in Fresh Off the Boat (ABC, 2015–2020). Ken Jeong adopts a similarly accented voice and childish English pronunciation in The Hangover films released in 2009, 2011, and 2013.

7. There are approximately 80 US military bases in non-American nations around the globe.

8. The pilot episode of I’m Dying Up Here (Showtime, 2017–18) also recognizes the considerable honor of being invited onto ‘the couch’ to speak with the host after the comic finishes his set.

9. Oland made a career in Hollywood by playing Charlie Chan in 16 movies, Dr. Fu Manchu in four movies, and Henry Chang in Shanghai Express (1932, Josef von Sternberg).

10. The author thanks Bambi Haggins, Denise Mann, Ellen Scott, and Todd Kushigemachi for their support during the development of this article.

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Notes on contributors

Grace Jung

Grace Jung is a PhD candidate in Cinema and Media Studies at UCLA. Her article ‘Aspirational Paternity and the Female Gaze on Korean Reality-Variety TV’ is published in Media, Culture & Society.