Awkwafina’s Weird Career Arc Has Taken Her to Comedy Central

Posted On Feb 20, 2020 By admin With Comments Off

encouragement: “I don’t know how, but I think they’re liking it, ” she yells, checking her laptop. “Guy from Tasmania merely donated a bitcoin.” Ennobled, Nora gets too excited( “I’m gonna do that Bezos money! I’m gonna back up the truck! ” ), protrusions into a candle whilst backing up the truck, and unknowingly light-footeds her dragon fanny on fire.

CHENISE[ scared ]: “Ooooh, you’re lit! ”

NORA[ inattentive ]: “I’m lit! ”

CHENISE: “No , no, you’re on fire! ”

NORA[ still forgetful ]: “I’m on fire! ”

CHENISE: “Your tail! ”

NORA[ no longer oblivious ]: “Whaaaat? ”

Fiery hilarity ensues. Well, six seconds’ worth of fiery exhilaration, anyway–Comedy Central ain’t got much of a stunt plan. Still, make that be a lesson to you about the dangers of mistreating rap-adjacent slang, although an exceptional finesse with rap-adjacent slang is a huge part of the reason Awkwafina went this gig in the first place.

Awkwafina Is Nora From Queens, which debuts Wednesday night and is already refreshed for Season 2, does indeed tell the droll, semiautobiographical narration of the young woman of Chinese and Korean American descent born Nora Lum( in Queens) who firstly skyrocketed to viral prominence as Awkwafina via the 2012 rap charade “My Vag.” Yes, “My vag acquired Best Vag, ” rapped the insolent multihyphenate hypebeast who would, eight years later, acquire the 2020 Golden Globe for Best Actress in a Motion-picture show, Musical or Comedy. “Your vag won Best Supporting Vag.”

Her voice had not yet acquired the signature booming CBD-and-sandpaper rasp that compiles her sound like, as she placed it, “a 58 -year-old divorce attorney.”( “Even men, when they impersonate my spokesperson, they get lower.”) Nor was Awkwafina yet fully bending into the outlandish street-rapper caricature often is reproduced in both heated Twitter threads and diplomatic think fragments as a “blaccent, ” still a thorny question in 2018, when she broke out via near-simultaneous scene-stealing capacities in Ocean’s Eight and Crazy Rich Asians.( “You gon’ roll up to that uniting, you gon’ be like, bak bak, bitch.”)

The cumulative make is quietly one of the stranger budding-superstar arcs of our time, and a Comedy Central vehicle is not exactly the highest point of that arc: Awkwafina Is Nora From Queens has been in the works since 2017 at least, and presents a dramatic step down from The Farewell, the tender and visceral 2019 Lulu Wang film that truly made Awkwafina that Golden Globe.( “This is great, ” her splendidly deadpan acceptance speech began. “If I ever fall on hard times, I can sell this.”) Thus does the appearance simultaneously outline a fictional 27 -year-old deadbeat endeavor and a real-life 31 -year-old Hollywood phenom slumming.

Awkwafina Is Nora From Queens is fine. Dumb, but fine. Pretty dumb, though. It is patently striving for Broad City-style lovable-loser vibrance and plainly doesn’t get there, in part because it can’t hope to manufacture anything approaching Abbi-and-Ilana chemistry.( It’s unquestionably no The Other Two, either .)

Which is not to say that Awkwafina doesn’t surround herself with endowment. BD Wong, for example, dallies her mesmerizingly chill father and moves the pilot with a perplexed remember of her birth: “You known better your father was in labor for like 37 hours? You grasp onto her uterus like the Thing. It was so gross, soldier. I shed up on the nurse.” Saturday Night Live rookie Bowen Yang, whose haughty eyebrows should immediately get their own separate Comedy Central vehicles, has a too-fleeting role as a stuffy Silicon Valley doofus; Lori Tan Chinn, as Nora’s profane grandmother, does the best she can with the annoying profane-grandmother gig.( “I told the hairdresser I wanted to look like Eminem” is much funnier, for the record, than “This was a picture of my vagina after my hysterectomy.”)

Awkwafina herself, meanwhile, radiates a rapturous and apparently brainless off-kilter charm that sunburns brighter the subtler it is. She’s a living-at-home burnout who can’t get( and/ or retain) a task, who snickers Adderall, who is smart enough to count cards at an Atlantic City blackjack table but dumb enough to announce that she’s doing so, who gamely delivers routes like, “They should’ve called it’ bi-school, ’ cause I was bi as fucking back then. Bisexual. Vagina and penis.” But the funniest thing she does in the captain( atmosphere: sincere) is simply roll down her auto opening, an resonate of the funniest thing she does in Crazy Rich Asians.

This broad and spotty show is a hell of a time to absorb the lesson that the mantra Less Is More applies to this person peculiarly, though The Farewell once proved that in dramatically different, and in fact roughly incompatible, situations. What I’m saying is that it’s dreadfully jarring the first time Nora entitles her tiresomely profane Comedy Central grandmother Nai Nai.

The triumph of Awkwafina in The Farewell–she wizards as the similarly adrift Billi, who tours from NYC back to China so her family can say goodbye to her grandmother, who is( humanely, arguably) unaware she’s dying of cancer–is not the tired age-old preposterou comedian goes spectacular by thoroughly suppressing her wackiness cliche, but something savvier and quieter and more sweetly devastating. It’s a movie about suppressing your spirits, about not saying or for that matter not acting what you’re feeling, where the whole dramatic friction is whether Billi’s ever going to crack and behave like she’s a person in an Oscar-worthy drama.( The Farewell actually should’ve been nominated for, like, 10 Oscars, dammit .)

Moreover, like Crazy Rich Asians( an outlandish success) or Ocean’s Eight( a moneymaker but a sizable displeasure) or even late 2019 ’s Jumanji: The Next Level( experts agree she embezzles it ), it’s an ensemble section wherein Awkwafina’s star power proliferates tenfold for every other person in the enclose. With Billi, the volatile troublemaker, the cartoonish faildaughter, even the problematic viral-video scamp Awkwafina represents is always present, but repressed in a natural and heartbreaking room. The camera appears on, unblinking and unmoving, as Billi and her beloved Nai Nai( Zhao Shuzhen) run through Nai Nai’s morning activities, circling each other, chuckling and strolling off camera. There’s simultaneously nothing and everything to this: They’re just acting at all, and hitherto communicating a dozen teary-eyed monologues’ worth of raw feeling.

Part of that fresh feeling is the small miracle of a film predominantly set in China getting any non-foreign-category Golden Globes courtesy at all; for all her culture-clashing singularity, every new milestone Awkwafina reaches is partially a succes of the representatives, too.( Her monologue when she hosted SNL in 2018 was quite wobbly until she highly endearingly screamed out Lucy Liu, the only other Asian girl to ever host the substantiate .) Which in turn meets the blaccent disagreement especially fraught, and the Comedy Central register, which quite explicitly harkens back to Awkwafina’s roots–in a ludicrou promotional takeover, for one week simply, she’s the voice of the no. 7 train–is of course involved in Queens, in her pre-rap-star salad days, in her genre- and identity-fluid origin story that is technically still ongoing. In the early bouts it’s trampling gently, rap-braggadocio-wise, and regardles, her last musical job, the 2018 EP In Fina We Trust, politely suggests that hip-hop is not her future, with all due respect to the line “Pussy so wet that it swim with fishes.”

No, her future appears to lie in literally everything and everywhere else. It is unfair maybe to compare Nora Is Awkwafina From Queens to the low-key mastery of The Farewell or the much higher-key mastery of the various recent Comedy Central testifies much better than it. The show is fine, albeit awfully foolish, and it’s an entirely different dramatic athletic that only highlights her ability–a little uncomfortable but absolutely undeniable–to play a whole lot of different sports. “My trajectory doesn’t make any sense, ” Awkwafina told The New York Times last week, in a diplomatic reply to the suggestion that this sitcom was inconvenient to her bizarrely stratospheric occupation. She’s above it. You’re above it, more. But there is pleasure, albeit also a sense of unclear trepidation, in watching her semigracefully wallow it in anyway.