Comedy Preview from Straight.com - July 31st - August 6th 2003

Comedy Preview

Rigg Mixes Comedy, Culture, and Hip-Hop

By Guy MacPherson

Kate Rigg is a festival unto herself. The Canadian comic, now living in New York, sings, dances, acts, raps, and tells jokes. Her new show, Birth of a nAsian, closes the 17th-annual Vancouver International Comedy Festival on Monday (August 4) at the Stanley Theatre.

"I have a lot of crossover with a lot of what I do," she says on the phone from her Upper West Side apartment. "It's funny but it's political. It's a poem but it's funny. It's hip-hop but it's a comedy."

The Juilliard School acting graduate addresses racial issues in her comedy, sending up stereotypes with a band of characters, from a Southeast Asian housewife turned professional dominatrix to a token Asian newscaster to a 100-year-old Trinidadian woman tracing her roots. But rather than attacking the stereotypes, she opts simply to address the inner life of a North American Asian person and show us a wide range of types. Her characters are, as she describes them, "these surprising mongrel characters" like herself. The biracial Rigg (mother Indonesian, father Australian) calls herself a "rice cracker". And although she does have a point to get across, she never loses sight of her ultimate goal: to make people laugh.

"I'm a message artist," she says, "but I'm a funny comic. I chose comedy as my medium and I'm committed to it. I've spent a lot of time in the clubs. Birth of a nAsian is funny because it fits in the place between comedy and smart-people theatre. And the way the smart-people theatre is delivered is in this hip-hop with a soundtrack and beats."

One doesn't immediately associate hip-hop with either Asians or comedy, but Rigg manages to bring it all together.

"Hip-hop is minorities and marginalized people who have something to say, who aren't traditionally heard in mainstream media, speaking loud and speaking strong and speaking with a different heartbeat than what's normally out there," she says. "So it's a really cool way of performing this stuff. We love it."

"We" is Rigg and her partner, Lyris Hung, a classically trained violinist. With her tattoos and electric violin, Hung is not your stereotypical Juilliard music grad. But that's to be expected in this show: Rigg's intent is to display to her audiences the range of what Asian-ness can embody, whether it's in stereotypical form or not.

"The problem with stereotypes is that when people don't look any further, they tend to dehumanize the person who's the object of their stereotype," she says. "But stereotypes are also great comic fodder because we can all recognize a stereotype, and if you have a sense of humour about them, they can become super jokes. You're not running away from them or ignoring them or pretending they don't exist. You're smacking them around in the comedy boxing ring a little bit. And everybody's made better by it: the comic's made better, the audience is made better, and the world is a little better."

Rigg, who was featured in Time magazine's 2001 "Coolest Canadians" issue, is not unlike another popular Asian comic, Margaret Cho. Cho does standup, as opposed to Rigg's character-based comedy, but both address what it is to be Asian in North America, and both have an affinity for gay culture.

"We're both kind of freaky girls," says Rigg. "I'm heavily influenced by drag. I'm a voyeur and a drag hag. When I was a teenager looking at drag queens, I was like, 'This is so cool. What he's saying is, "I'm not what you see on the outside." '

" It would be hard to come up with a better summation of her show.