From The Globe and Mail - Thursday, May 2, 2002

'I sweat satire'
Delivering a slick sendup of Asian stereotypes, Kate Rigg's comedy packs a political wallop of which she's fiercely proud

By LEATRICE SPEVACK
Special to The Globe and Mail

TORONTO -- 'I say 'Chink' a lot," crows self-confessed "fag hag, drag hag, queer-culture vulture, alternative-voiced, disco-singing, hip-hop-rappin' diva" -- and half-Asian character comic -- Kate Rigg. "I pull the air out, exploit the word without exploiting the people," insists the creator of the musical comedy Chink-O-Rama."I say it till I sweat satire."

Born and raised in Toronto, Rigg, who now lives on Manhattan's Upper West Side, admits that as a youngster she did not often suffer racist comments. But, she says, "When I was really, really little -- like 6 or 7 -- I once punched someone in the nose for calling me a Chink. I was, 'I'm not a Chink, I'm Indonesian!'

"Now, in my wise old age, I realize it's all the same," continues Rigg, 28. "When someone calls you a Chink, then you are one. You are being given a racist calling, so you are it."

Capitalizing creatively on her heritage as the daughter of a North Sumatran mother and an Australian father, she hatched the critically acclaimed Chink-O-Rama last year while performing on New York stages, as well as at Montreal's Just for Laughs Festival, and in Toronto at both the March of Dames and We're Funny That Way comedy festivals.

Touted in 2001 by Toronto's Now magazine as "the second-best comedy show of the year," and earning Rigg ink in a Time magazine segment entitled Canada -- The Next Generation, Chink-O-Rama is a slick sendup of Asian stereotypes that also delivers an unapologetic political punch.

Take Rigg's Asian phone-sex operator, purring to her excited caller: "Show me your big American know-how . . . I wearing something real special for you -- genuine silk panty sewn by my cousin Siti in Kathie Lee sweatshop. She barely legal, but she work all night for you. . . . Pump my economy."

Followers of things funny might twig to the notion that Rigg has borrowed this race-based concept from fellow New Yorker John Leguizamo, whose Spic-O-Rama played hilariously on his Hispanic roots, garnering him numerous awards and an HBO special. Rigg insists that imitation, in this case, is pure flattery. "John Leguizamo totally rocks," she says. "Calling my show Chink-O-Rama was both a nod to the history of this kind of work, and a tribute to one of its fiercest proponents."

Even more important, it's gotten her noticed. Two weeks from now, she'll find out whether her Fox-TV pilot, Kings of Comedy Primetime, gets the green light to become a series. Rigg's role is that of a token non-black. "Since I am a Chigger from way back -- that's a Chink who pretends to be a sista -- I was in heaven," she says. "I think any actor in sketch comedy should be able to play any ethnicity if they are good enough. Otherwise," she says with a laugh, "I will be playing a recurring Indonesian-Australian-Canadian, and honey, I reserve the right to raid the wig shop at Fox freely."

In the meantime, she'll be back skewering Asian stereotypes in Toronto, performing her new show, Somebody's Kid, from tomorrow through Saturday, at this year's We're Funny That Way, a comedy festival hosted by Toronto's gay and lesbian community. Influenced by character comediennes Tracey Ullman and Lily Tomlin, Rigg dishes up a bizarre array of anachronistic personalities who are pigeonholed by their pigmentation.

Among them are a token Asian newscaster with a non-Asian name, a 100-year-old Trinidadian auntie, and Shanti Om Shanti, a Southeast Asian housewife turned professional dominatrix, who laments her fate thus: "Is it my fault that you arranged my marriage to a man who has a physics degree but cannot even make it here as a cab driver? . . . [My] husband is too cautious. Obviously his mother did not beat him enough. Yes, it has made me -- how you say -- a powerhouse!"

Rigg is her own kind of powerhouse, converting casual conversation into a sort of jazzed-up rap.

"Drag is my aesthetic," she says. "I love rousing disco anthems, strong women singers and songs . . . anything where you are not falling into your stereotypical, patriarchally assigned gender role. I reject and dispute all rules of behaviour prescribed by the antiquated Emily Post-meets-Eminem-meets-Rush Limbaugh asshole that exists in the minds of the fearful and the paranoid and the oppressed-by-their-parents." Barely pausing, she adds, "I celebrate everybody's right to determine who they are, independent of what they look like or what naughty bits are lodged between their thighs."

As far as the word Chink is concerned, Rigg feels that "uptight reactionaries" who take issue are "just as trapped by this word as the bigots who use it or think it in earnest." Her own theory: "If I say it enough, not only will it be continually shown to be a ridiculous, nonsense word; it will also rip it from the mouths of people who fetishize it in their racism."

Rigg didn't pull such ideas out of thin air. Running away from home at 17, she studied at Australia's University of Melbourne, whose "very progressive, lefty English department" offered a degree in subcultures. For her thesis, titled Drag and Drama by Aboriginal Women,she interviewed performers and writers who, she says, "had voices demanding to be heard among the football culture, and white male dynamic, that was at the surface of the Australian Zeitgeist.

"I also specialized," she adds with a laugh, "in learning big words and using them in sentences."

Accepted by Australia's National Institute of Dramatic Art (once the stomping ground of Judy Davis, Russell Crowe and Mel Gibson), she soon ascertained that, "if I trained there, every single job I got in Oz would put me in the position of 'first Asian ever to play Shakespeare, first Asian ever be a regular in a series,' . . . and I didn't feel like being a poster child for my Asian-ness. I am a mixed-breed, mixed-media trickster, and I reserve the right to morph. Or I have ADD."

In 1997, she enrolled at New York's prestigious Juilliard School. But it, too, was an experience "that didn't turn out to be as fab as I thought it would be." Once again, she says, "they found it difficult to cast me, precisely because I'm between cultures."

Like many others who feel disenfranchised from mainstream show biz, Rigg turned to comedy, participating in character nights at Caroline's Comedy Club in Manhattan. But such gigs, as well as one-off theme shows in alternative-comedy venues, don't pay the bills.

Television commercials, however, do.

Quickly concluding that all Asian people wear glasses in ads, Rigg, who doesn't require spectacles, packs two pairs for auditions -- "my 'professional' glasses, if I'm sort of like a doctor or a lecturer, and what I call my 'groovy art-dealer glasses,' if I'm just trying to be a quirky Asian office worker, quirky Asian architect, or whatever. That's my demographic. As soon as I figured that out, I booked three national commercials within three months."

As much as she's been able to both send up and exploit her heritage, Rigg says she's "looking forward to the day that Asians on TV and in movies are not one of the following: delicate Oriental lotus flower, dragon lady, martial-arts expert, castrati, nail lady, take-out guy, Asian hottie dominatrix." Instead, she says, "I am looking forward to Asian actors being 'that cute guy' or 'that chick's hilarious friend.' Know what I mean?"

Kate Rigg certainly does.

We're Funny That Way runs at Buddies in Bad Times Theatre, 12 Alexander St., Toronto, from today through Sunday. For more information, call 416-975-8555.