REVIEW: UH OH

Phil Wang - UH OH, Photograph by Edward Moore @edshots

The well-established stand-up comedian Phil Wang has grown a moustache, and it seems to have caught everyone's attention, including his own. UH OH is a show about the ageing millennial, and it opens with an observation: in popular films, Chinese men rarely grow facial hair until they are very old and have retreated to the forest as kung fu masters. The tache, then, is a promotion of sorts. 'I am evil now,' Wang declares, before settling into what it really signals: older, more complicated, and quite possibly 'uncool'.

Wang refuses to pick a side, whether on gender, left and right, the environment or lifestyle. He sits in the middle of every heated argument and holds the complexity that labels flatten. Yet the middle here is not soft. The jokes have teeth, and they are aimed squarely at the era of 'woke capitalism' around which the show is built.

Wang tells us he has bought a house in a 'cool' part of south-east London, where he lives with a rich collection of high-maintenance houseplants. Having lived in the same part of the city for almost ten years, I found his material on what makes a place 'cool' familiar. 'Cool', in Wang's telling, means gentrified: the 'good' (chains like Gail's) sitting alongside the 'bad' (wild-eyed people running down the street chasing strangers), and nobody quite sure which is better: To be cool or not to be cool.

Living in a 'cool' area still raises the question of what makes a person 'uncool'. Ageing brings its own panic: is getting older the same as drifting right? Wang reassures himself that to be more conservative, one first needs something to 'conserve'. The same scepticism extends to identity politics. Asked about his pronouns, he replies 'he/he/he', a giggling twist on he/him. He turns on corporate Pride and the pink economy's appetite for surface-level inclusion, and on the grammar of political correctness: if 'coloured people' is among the worst things you can say about non-white people and 'people of colour' is perfectly acceptable, can racism really be cured by swapping the order of words?

Race and heritage remain rich ground, as the 'people of colour' bit already shows. Being British and Chinese-Malaysian, he explains, means feeling 'privileged' everywhere. In former British colonies like Hong Kong, he marvels at how great it is to be British, given that Britain once owned the place. In the UK, he marvels at how great it is to be Chinese, since the Chinese will soon own this place too. It pokes fun at a reversed colonial gaze, and knowingly teases the anxieties projected onto people of Chinese heritage. There are pointed bits, too, on David Bowie and the casual racism in how Asians are depicted in his music videos.

The generations either side of Wang get it as well. Wang sees his own generation as stranded in between: lacking the elders' time to remember street names or make things by hand, lacking the boomers' wealth, and lacking the tech fluency of Gen Z. A wasted generation, stuck in the middle, getting older, gaining body fat, and knowing every road only as the 'blue road' on Google Maps.

Most of that middle-aged body fat, he complains, has somehow settled in his neck, sending him into a frenzy worthy of Richard E. Grant in How to Get Ahead in Advertising (1989). Worse still, with the moustache he now resembles a knock-off North Korean leader. In baggy black trousers and a loose red shirt, he fully embodies a man in the middle of a midlife crisis. The self-mockery is constant, and it is the engine of the show: every polarised public debate is folded back into his own confusion and the unavoidable business of growing old.

Wang does not like woke, and he does not like capitalism, so the jokes live where the two meet, and he takes aim at both sides from the middle. There is a misanthropic streak, but underneath it lies something more generous: a refusal to join the chaos of polarisation, and a desire to let people on all sides feel good about themselves while laughing at the very things that make them feel good.

★★★★

For more information, please visit: https://sohotheatre.com/events/phil-wang-uh-oh/

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