Sidesplitter: How To Be From Two Worlds At Once

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Calling all Phil Wang fans - the dude has written a book! Essentially his musings on what it means to be mixed race in today’s world with a whole lot of funny thrown in, Sidesplitter is a thought (and chortle) provoking read. From History to nature, food to love, Wang covers his experience of life being from two very different worlds, and there is both serious discussion and laughs aplenty. Wang doesn’t recoil from the racism that he’s all too often met but he also doesn’t wallow in it and refuses to be a victim. He generally adopts a positive attitude to being of mixed race – I liked his opinion that he’s not half-English and half-Malaysian but both English and Malaysian.

Sidesplitter: How to Be from Two Worlds at Once (Audio

Incidentally, Wang also confesses to leaning into the British psyche: ‘a sort of apologetic arrogance, a bumbling and shy sense of absolute superiority’– as you can tell from his self-deprecating, but ultimately high-status - tone.

I think about race a lot because I have no choice. The child of a white woman and an Asian man, the subject of race has always been a part of my life and it always will be."

Phil Wang to publish first book, Sidesplitter - British

I animatedly quoted Warren Buffett’s dying words to a group of friends only to be informed that he wasn’t dead. I hadn’t realised how much I use standup to process my own thoughts’: Phil Wang. Photograph: Pål Hansen/The Observer rounded up to 5. Far denser than I expected, while still feeling like a broad intro survey to Asian American pop history. I recommend the syllabus sections for further exploration because each topic is deserving of their own deep dives. Despite the title, the Before section does a decent job at describing from the earliest waves of immigration through the 1980s, historically and in pop culture. The authors' reasoning for nineties onward is because that's when the children of post-1965 Hart-Cellar Act immigration waves started making art (which isn't to say previous waves existed! In sheer terms of numbers there's more post-65 Asian Americans than prior waves like my own family). With the blurb and introduction indicating that this was more essays than memoir, I'd hoped that Wang would have some funny and interesting things to say. And as it turned out, he had some interesting things to say, with autobiographical elements adding colour to the topics he explored and how they affected him as a mixed-race person. Wang has appeared in The Rob Brydon Show, Comedy Up Late, About Tonight, It Was Alright in the 70's, Room 101, Have I Got News for You, Unspun with Matt Forde, Would I Lie to You?, Live at the Apollo, 8 Out of 10 Cats Does Countdown, The Dog Ate My Homework, Hypothetical, Outsiders, and Insert Name Here. He has also acted in the sitcom Top Coppers. In January 2018, he took part in Comedy Central's Roast Battle, hosted by Jimmy Carr, in which he battled friend and fellow comedian Ed Gamble: Wang won the battle.

How JIS Brunei enabled these students to enter the world's elite universities". Study International News. 19 October 2018 . Retrieved 12 June 2020. It's about how to consolidate two home countries into one unified identity, what it's like always having family on the other side of the world no matter where I am, and whether or not it is possible for everyone to feel a strong sense of home. I also wanted to answer the question 'Where are you really from?' by saying 'You'll have to buy my book'."

Sidesplitter, by Phil Wang : Book reviews 2021 : Chortle Sidesplitter, by Phil Wang : Book reviews 2021 : Chortle

But whenever I felt the show wanting for an injection of oomph, it got one, via a well-hewn joke or unlikely formulation, if not from any variation in Wang’s delivery. There’s a choice routine about what makes white people panic – not what you’d expect, but not something you can deny. There’s a section on the editing process of his recent book – which might sound highbrow but ends up, via “a wank that was primarily admin”, as anything but. What a brilliant read. Wang is thoroughly entertaining, punny (with great footnotes, too), and educating. I left this book feeling really refreshed and very much looking forward to being able to travel again (hopefully soon). He has a refreshingly different take on topics of culture and belonging. At a time when many people are seeking increasingly granular definitions of what groups they are in, and defending each one vigorously, Wang advocates for the more relaxed, melting-pot attitudes of Malaysia. He even writes at quite some length in praise of the 1970s sitcom Mind Your Language, and its collection of crude racial stereotypes. It’s an unexpected stance, but part of the joy of the book is how you can’t quite be sure what’s coming. He even defends Amber Rudd for referring to Diana Abbott as a ‘coloured woman’ as an honest slip of the tongue.In his 20s, Wang began to make modest changes to his look. He had always worn thin, frameless spectacles hoping, he thinks, that people wouldn’t realise he was wearing glasses at all. Then, one day in Specsavers, he popped on a pair of oversized frames as a joke and saw they suited him. He had never thought much about his hair, but decided to finally spend money on a cut. “It’s arrogant to call it a transformation,” says Wang. “I mean, who knows if it’s even better, but it feels better. It’s certainly more expensive.” I recently read the book "Rise: A Pop History of Asian America from the Nineties to Now" by Jeff Yang, Phil Yu and Philip Wang and was absolutely delighted by the clever and entertaining way the authors gather many short prose pieces and graphical content from contributors from many corners to present many different perspectives into the experiences of Asian Pacific Americans through the lens of popular culture and our localized sub-culture. The book ranges from the sobering timeline and, honestly, baseline of racist propaganda in America to the hilarious and heartwarming anecdotes more recent triumphs. Though the book touches from when the first Filipino slaves jumped ship from the Spanish Galleons in 1762, the book focuses on the last three decades of Asian American history, from the 1990s through the 2010s. The bits I thought best were those about Malaysian culture, in particular the nature of its language and approach to family. Part of that was because it was new to me, but nonetheless it was an insightful contrast with the UK, and also matched something that Tony Hawks had found when he went to Moldova - there is more room for comedy and frivolity when society has become settled and the fundamentals sorted out.