A reliable equation for humor, according to an idiom in the United States, is simple: “Comedy equals tragedy plus time.” Youngmi Mayer has a corresponding Korean aphorism: “If you laugh while crying, hair will grow out of your butthole.” This is the logline of her podcast, aptly titled Hairy Butthole, which links humor with the saddest of life’s circumstances. These sad–funny recollections are the subject of Mayer’s new book, I’m Laughing Because I’m Crying: A Memoir (Little, Brown and Company, 2024).
Mayer’s unique, bicultural perspective on what makes a good joke is what makes the book compelling. She grew up in South Korea and Saipan, the daughter of an Irish American father from the United States and a mother from South Korea. This intercultural awareness and intellectual nimbleness facilitated humor and empathy in equal measure. Mayer recalls stories from her bilingual and biracial childhood, analyzing generational trauma with candor and aplomb. Of her Korean and Irish forebears, Mayer writes, “The jokes were what made it possible for us to continue. I would not be here without inappropriate humor.” Mayer’s complicated, unique, and sometimes absurd perspective on her junkie-wannabe twenties, her unconventional, successful thirties, and the world in general makes for a can’t-put-it-down narrative.
I spoke with Mayer over Zoom about how she found success as a stand-up comedian by subverting Asian American stereotypes, finding humor in hirsuteness, and not seeking parental approval.
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The Rumpus: The title, I’m Laughing Because I’m Crying, as you explain in the beginning of the book, relates to generational trauma. You write about rape, sex work, and how you tried to become a junkie but couldn’t get addicted to heroin because you’re allergic to opiates. How do you determine where to draw the line between what is too sad to share in the book, and what is both sad and funny?
Youngmi Mayer: The truth is, I think everything can be funny. There were funny stories about the sex work thing, obviously, which I can talk about, but I wasn’t sure if I wanted it in the book. I still can find humor in it. I can make it into funny anecdotes. I don’t think that there is really a line. In that specific case, it was just about what I wanted to put in the book or not.
I guess the line that I have is that there are certain things people are so triggered by, or hurt by, and I try to consider how much that will happen for somebody else. I don’t know if that’s actually fully true, because I know so many people who have experienced heroin addiction, and that’s definitely not going to be funny to them. I think anything can be funny, truthfully. It’s just up to the person sharing the story.
Rumpus: You write about what you wore at all these critical life stages—the school uniforms, the punk ensemble, the American Apparel minidress that you wore on a first date with the guy who became your ex-husband. Fashion seems very integral to the memories about your growth and development. What did you wear when you were writing the book? Was your clothing at all important to that process?
Mayer: I have a sort of strange relationship with clothes. I do care about what I look like and how I dress, but it’s something that I find very exhausting now. So, I buy these staples. I wear this skirt, and I bought ten of them, and they’re ten dollars. I just wear that every day because I know I like it. The way that I dress, normally, on a day-to-day basis, comes off as kind of dressed up to some people. So, a lot of times people will be like, “Oh, you’re dressed up!” But that’s just how I dress.
I had a shift during COVID, where I started to really dress more feminine. I leaned into that because I was doing the opposite before. Going into stand-up, I thought that was how I was going to get people to respect me. But then I thought it was more interesting to be dressed very much as a woman. Like this concept that people have that they look down on this dumb bitch kind of person. And then I thought that that was a more interesting statement because it was subverting that idea.
Rumpus: You write “Stand-up was the perfect medium for me because it required a lot of hard work for very little reward, and I hated reward.” That sentiment is very relatable for a lot of writers: the difficulty itself is the reward. How is writing for your stand-up act different from writing a book?
Mayer: I think stand-up writing is a million times more difficult. The reason for that is word economy. I’m really glad that I actually learned how to write stand-up before I wrote the memoir. I wrote professionally in this medium because I started with the hard thing first. Word economy is, basically, the skill that you have to really hone to become a successful stand-up comedian. It’s the ability to take a story that’s five pages long and turn it into three sentences. Not only that but you have to find the funniest, most interesting part of the story and whittle everything down to like the premise. Learning how to write like that is great because you already know exactly what the story is about.
I struggled a little bit in the beginning of writing the memoir because I wrote the book like I write stand-up. I sent it to one of my friends who is an author, and he said, “I don’t know why you write like you don’t have any time, because you have a lot of time.” So I did have to unlearn a lot of that, to write the book.
Stand-up is so difficult because there’s no room. In a book, you can just say the whole thing and there’s no chance that people are going to misunderstand you because you say everything. I think that’s also why so many stand-up comedians get into hot water and end up getting in trouble, because they boil a nuanced story down to a joke.
Rumpus: As you were working on this, did you read any memoirs to look at as models, for structure?
Mayer: I did go and read them, specifically because I don’t [normally] read them, and I wanted to see how other people write them. So I ended up reading two. Anthony Bourdain’s Kitchen Confidential, his first one, which, strangely, I had never read. I started his second one, but I didn’t finish it.
I also read Michelle Zauner’s Crying in H Mart, which I had started reading when it first came out, but I had to stop because it was so difficult. I finished Crying in H Mart when I was almost done with my book. Part of me was afraid that there would be repetitive stories, so I wanted to write my book first. Then, I finished hers.
Rumpus: Your humor in the book, as in your stand-up, almost always punches up. How do you come up with these jokes? Do you do writing exercises? Do you relentlessly revise? What’s your secret?
Mayer: It’s an instinctive thing. I think it probably comes from being in middle school and making fun of people. As we grow up, we’re told not to think that way or say things like that, but I still held on to [it]. I guess it’s like a skill that you hone. You see something and you think of the funniest thing that it reminds you of. I don’t even know how to describe how to work on that muscle. That’s not the part of stand-up that’s difficult. Editing is difficult in stand-up. But that kind of roasty humor just comes naturally to me.
Rumpus: You write really beautifully about the cultural longing and the loss that you feel on behalf of Korea for Korean American adoptees, including your ex-husband, Danny. Did you feel like you had a pretty open rein to write about him and your relationship or did you have to be more guarded because you are divorced or because of your co-parenting?
Mayer: No, I had open rein. Danny and I have a very good relationship. I almost wish I could have written more about the relationship we have because it’s one of the things that I’m really proud of. My son’s life has greatly benefited from the work that we did in making sure our relationship was really good. Even my therapist was like, “I have so many clients that co-parent and are divorced and this is so rare to see two of you care about the life of your child and you put that first.” It’s very healthy.
I told Danny, “You know, I’m going to write about you. Do you want to look at it after I’m done?” And he was like, “No. I respect your process and trust you to be fair and honest.” But I did give him an early, very advanced copy back in March or April. He was happy and fine with it. I think the reason why he’s so open about my creative output is that I was the same way with his restaurant. I respected his work. We were running the restaurant together and I never came to that situation, like, “I’m gonna fix it. I want you to do this with the dish. This isn’t good.” I respected his skill. It’s a reciprocal respect. He respects me as a writer.
Rumpus: You write that your parents were not great caretakers of you and your sister. Did you share any drafts of this book with your parents?
Mayer: No. I’m kind of worried about it. I think it’s getting worse as time goes on, as we get closer to publication. The earliest feedback I received from my friends was: “Oh, my God! What are your parents going to say?” But the book isn’t really written to point at them, like they’re horrible people. I never set out to say that. It’s confusing to me that people read it and say, “Oh, they’re really horrible and bad.” I don’t think they were that bad. From other people that I’ve known in my life, all my friends, the anecdotes I have about my parents seem pretty much on par with everyone else.
My friends who have written memoirs said, “I held back about talking about my family because I didn’t want them to get upset. I read your memoir, and you didn’t do that.”
If everyone has these kinds of relationships, then why are we not talking about it? I get it, that you don’t want your parents to get mad at you, but if we all were open about it, we would realize this happens to all of us.
Rumpus: Who are those friends, and what are their memoirs?
Mayer: The most recent person who told me that was Sarah Cooper, a comedian who wrote Foolish: Tales of Assimilation, Determination, and Humiliation. Also Mary H.K. Choi said something along the lines of being completely and fully honest with your family stuff. She writes fiction, but even then, there are things that she won’t tread into.
Rumpus: What did you do to access those memories from your childhood and young adulthood? You write about using Instagram as an archive.
Mayer: I just have very vivid memories of childhood incidents. All the stuff that I write about that happened to me, those are from my memories. I have a lot of emotional, sentient memories. I remember how I felt in those moments. Obviously, some of the details I’m filling in to what I imagined. Tapping into how I felt in the moment is where all the memories lie.
I do have extremely vivid memories of childhood that I realize are different from other people. There are some incidents that are burned into my brain because they’re traumatic. Because when you have a traumatic incident, you become super vigilant and you remember the smells, the feeling of your shirt, what your body was doing, and the trees. You just remember every little thing. There’s some of that going on as well.
Rumpus: I want to ask you about the title of your podcast, Hairy Butthole. Did you choose the word butthole over asshole for a reason?
Mayer: Yes, because the one thing that’s really great about being really fluent in Korean is that my translation of words isn’t just the textbook translation. It really takes into account how the word is used and how it feels. When Korean people say the Korean word for butthole, it’s silly, funny, and softer. Like how we use butthole. It’s silly. Adults won’t even say that. Whereas asshole is slur territory. It’s very adult. It does get censored. Even my podcast title gets censored in Instagram posts. I couldn’t call the book that because, I guess, my publishing house had books with swear words in them, and they said that it really affects the marketing.
Rumpus: Are you working on any other writing projects?
Mayer: I have a very loose idea to maybe write a children’s book. It’s at the very genesis, the beginning stage. There’s a hole in the market for young children who are now kind of more savvy. Even six-to-eight-year-olds, or eight-to-ten-year-olds, they’re way more advanced in humor. Not necessarily more offensive humor. But they’re more advanced because they consume so much more humor content. They need a book that’s upgraded.
I feel like kids’ books still think of these children as babies and they write in this baby language. The average eight-year-old now talks more like what people think a thirteen-year-old talks like. This is based on my son. That’s just the loose concept.
Basically, it’s gonna be like a graphic novel. I just talked to my agent. Something like Diary of a Wimpy Kid, with the pictures.
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Author photograph by Fujio Emura
