Pride Month | Joel Kim Booster's Psychosexual is sharp, witty and terribly sarcastic

If you have been looking for stand-up comedy that is hilarious and hard-hitting, check out Psychosexual on Netflix. It is a solo act by Joel Kim Booster, a 34-year-old gay man of South Korean heritage who was adopted by white American parents and raised as a Baptist. There is enough lived experience in here to last at least an hour and seven minutes, which is the duration of the show. Booster will tell you that he can last much longer because he loves sex jokes. If you cannot tolerate what Netflix designates “crude humour”, please give this a miss. Apparently, Booster gets a lot of flak from gay men who see him as a terrible representative of the community because he presents them as hypersexual beings who flood multiple inboxes with photographs of their genitalia and are heavily into recreational drug use. Booster has little patience for such criticism but he mines it for comic material to be used in his set. He is out and proud but he hates to be the good and respectable kind that he is expected to be.

His comedy is designed to provoke not as an end in itself but to make the audience think. This intention is never disguised. In fact, Booster is at his best when he engages in what is typically called crowd work. He zeroes in on specific individuals and involves them in conversation. The responses that he elicits are cleverly woven into the tight but flexible structure of the script that he is working with. He is sharp, witty, and terribly sarcastic. People who find it difficult to laugh at themselves might struggle to appreciate his sense of humour. One of his digs is aimed at “rice queens” in the United States. These are white gay men with an Asian fetish, so they date only Asian gay men. According to Booster, these people think of themselves as progressive because they want to diversify their dating pool but they are closeted racists. They flaunt their Asian boyfriends and want brownie points for inclusion. Through the skilful use of humour, Booster calls out the complicated racial politics in the gay community. He does not spare Asians either, because they are racist towards other Asians. What is endearing about Booster is that he is self-obsessed but also self-deprecatory. He recognizes the internalized white supremacy that he lives with because of his white parents, and the fact that he has no South Korean traditions or grandparents to cherish and hold on to. He feels a bit like an imposter, so he questions why his Asian identity is so important to him. The most remarkable aspect of this show is how consistently Booster draws attention to the nuts and bolts of how he put it together. There is a clear thought process at work. He uses a three-part structure. The first part unpeels layers of his identity, and is geared towards audience members who show up because they feel represented in his work. The second part consists of material that could supposedly be performed by anyone – for example, cat jokes. The third part focuses on sex, and it delights in being raw and physical. No euphemisms. Booster will make you crack up throughout the show but he might also leave you with a bad taste in the mouth with some unnecessary body-shaming directed at the shape and look of private parts that he finds not so appealing. This comes as a surprise, given that the rest of the show is so much about asking people to be non-judgemental, and non-discriminatory. The anxiety that comes from thinking of oneself as undesirable wreaks havoc in the lives of so many gay men not just in the US but also in India and elsewhere. Booster seems oblivious.

Chintan Girish Modi is a journalist, commentator, and book reviewer.

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