Psycho Karaoke (review)

Psycho Karaoke, the latest offering from the Asian American sketch comedy team the 18 Mighty Mountain Warriors (18MMW), opens with one of the players asking the audience to recite the Pledge of Allegiance along with him. To demonstrate, he lifts his arm in a Nazi salute and shouts "Sieg Heil!" Incidentally, when the salute to the American flag was introduced in 1892, it featured this very posture. (During World War II, Congress revised the pledge to include the less historically loaded position of the hand over the heart.)

As patriotic rituals have a performative history, so performances on stage have a relation to patriotism, and to historical moments of heightened nationalism. Playing a mere two weeks after the onset of Operation Iraqi Freedom, Psycho Karaoke appears drawn in two directions. First, it desires to stage political dissent and comment on headline news; the show is salted with references to the SARS virus spreading in Asia and the propaganda war in and around Iraq. Second, it avoids, or at least leavens, their more controversial material with seemingly non-political, but side-shakingly funny, sketches on the evolution of feminine hygiene products (a wicked bit of physical comedy written by one of the troupe's few female principals, Rhoda Gravador) and the pursuit of a floppy disk in a bureaucratic dungeon of wizard wan-nabes known as "tech-support." Assembled as a program of greatest hits, Pyscho Karaoke makes
its most lasting impression through the ensemble cast's eclectic portraiture of Asian Americans as a heterogeneous group in terms of their obsessions, paranoias, tragedies, bodily perversions, and psychic tics. Do Asian Americans want "big boobs, big dicks, big noses, and big eyes" so that they can look more like white people (or white porn stars)? So suggest three men in bikinis, imitating the Chinese women's swim team, as they chant these enhancements in their advertisement for a plastic surgery clinic. Or are they more concerned with unraveling histories of imperialism and neocolonialism in Asia, as tackled in three connected sketches, written by Michael Premsrirat, about a mythical Southeast Asian island called Sukiprata, populated by eroticized "Amphiberasian" men whose way of life is threatened by 50,000 Chinese settlers who've come to set up banks?

The most conventionally activist sketch—in terms of U.S. racial politics—features a "Mr. Wright" giving a citizenship test to an Asian American played by one of the group's principal writer-actors, Michael Chih Ming Hornbuckle, who walks into Mr. Wright's office. The citizenship candidate insistently calls Mr. Wright "Mr. White!" and launches into mini-lectures in response to multiple- choice questions on the discovery of America ("America was never discovered it was conquered!") and the Bill of Rights ("the right to bears arms and kill others is America's most cherished value!").

At the same time, the humor of the 18MMW is not predominantly aimed at such rituals of citizenship that affirm white supremacy under the guise of patriotic duty. For instance, the opening ensemble routine, "John Woo's Easter Family Dinner," is a fabulously funny genre parody in the style of the celebrated Hong Kong filmmaker. The sketch imagines what would happen if the blind daughter of a Chinese family brought home her fiancé, and he turned out to be the mortal enemy of her two brothers. Peppered with topical references (the main course at dinner is "freedom falafel," with mama claiming she got the recipe off Fox), the sketch nonetheless relies primarily on physical humor: the three male principals (Hornbuckle, Greg Watanabe, and Harold Byun) morph into gangstas hiding their guns from mom and sis as they train their muzzles on each other, and negotiate the impossibility of holding two pistols each while trying to eat falafel (and Asian men just can't resist steaming food placed in front of their noses).

With influences ranging from Monty Python to Culture Clash, the 18MMW's self...