Sheng Wang turns mundane of everyday life into comedic laughs
When comedian Sheng Wang called for his interview with The Spokesman-Review, he was excited to share that he was cooking beans. Not just any beans though: Rancho Gordo beans. These heirloom beans have garnered quite a following over the years and can be considered a bit of a splurge at around $7 a pound.
“They’re for bean snobs,” Wang said. In his post-Netflix special life, Wang can afford to be a bean snob.
Wang admits he’s no professional chef, but he likes the process and preparation that comes with cooking a meal.
He also chatted about botanical gardens, which Wang mentions he enjoys exploring in his biography. He’s casually working on a show that pairs photos of plants he’s taken with stories of why he took those photos.
It’s a fun show, he swears.
“What’s cool about it is that people actually start to appreciate and enjoy plants in their environment once they leave the show,” he said.
That appreciation for small details, be it in the kitchen or while enjoying nature, has been with Wang since childhood, where he grew up exploring his backyard and the bayous of Houston, turning over rocks and digging holes.
It’s served him well for comedy too as he turns moments from everyday life – buying pants from Costco, wanting deep kitchen sinks so you don’t flood the counters while trying to wash cookie sheets and appreciating how easy it is to print personal things when you have an office job – into comedic bits.
The previous examples were featured in Wang’s debut Netflix special “Sweet and Juicy,” which was directed and produced by Ali Wong. A new hour of material, this time about lighting, toothbrushes, cooking, camping, berries and, yes, botanical gardens, brings Wang to the Martin Woldson Theatre at the Fox on Thursday.
Growing up in Houston, Wang didn’t see himself as the class clown and never craved attention from a crowd. In high school, he went with some friends to a local comedy club but remembers it simply as a fun night out, not a life-altering inspiration to pursue comedy.
Wang does remember feeling a bit of electricity from “the thrill of connecting with a big group of people” during the moments in school when he had to campaign for a leadership position for a club or committee. But still, he didn’t think about pursuing a career in something like comedy until college.
And even then, it wasn’t entirely Wang’s idea to try stand up.
Near the end of his freshman year at the University of California, Berkeley, Wang saw posters for an event that encouraged Asian-American students to perform an act of their choice. Wang attended the show and was impressed by what he saw. He then decided, though he didn’t know what his act would be, that he wanted to join the group that put on the event.
At the group’s first meeting Wang’s sophomore year, attendees were asked what act they might like to perform. Another student said stand up comedy, and Wang, thinking it sounded cool, said he wanted to try stand up too.
Each student had to share a little of their act, so Wang got up and told jokes about how he was feeling that day and what he was wearing, earning a few laughs from the other students.
“It was a very encouraging group,” he said. “All the jokes I told were terrible or stolen, not what you should be doing as a comedian.”
After graduating with a business degree, Wang began hitting the San Francisco comedy scene, taking in as much as he could while working to improve his craft. He later moved to New York and continued to learn and perform.
Wang released a Comedy Central Presents half-hour special in 2011 and competed on “Last Comic Standing” in 2015, making it to the top 10. From 2015 to 2018, Wang wrote for and story edited “Fresh Off the Boat.” He performed in “2 Dope Queens,” an HBO special presented by Phoebe Robinson and Jessica Williams, in 2019.
All the while Wang slowly and steadily built a fanbase of people drawn to his talent of making seemingly mundane topics the stars of his show. He understands the urge to always be on the hunt for crazier stories to tell, or to wish one’s upbringing was more dramatic or atypical, especially for newer comics trying to create more original material, but believes the illusion that you have to suffer to be a good artist is just that.
“I don’t think that’s a healthy way to live,” he said. “That’s why I’m in the lane that I’m in in terms of most of my act and my material revolves around very simple, mundane life things. I’m just trying to enjoy life.
“I do want to engage with life, and I do like cities that are very walkable and allow me to be in proximity to a lot of other things that could be going on that’s not necessarily part of my personal life, but just by virtue of the density of the city I can observe a lot of things, and that’s fun, and that’s energizing, and there’s definitely opportunities there to get material, whether it’s a picture or a joke or an idea …
“My process is be open to life, pay attention, there’s beauty and interesting things everywhere. It doesn’t have to be crazy and dramatic.”
That process eventually led him to “Sweet and Juicy,” which itself has led to Wang headlining theaters around the world. That likely would have happened one day, Wang said, but was accelerated by the special.
At these theater shows, Wang has noticed families in the audience, something he didn’t anticipate appreciating as much as he does.
“It really means a lot to me to see intergenerational families enjoy time together and to provide a reason for them to get together and spend time together,” he said. “I’m so grateful for that.”
From the sounds of it, venue staff are also grateful for the family friendly audiences. Wang said bartenders, ushers and security staff make it a point to tell him how nice his audiences are and that it’s extremely rare for someone to get rowdy enough to be removed from one of his shows.
“I never thought about that part of the business, and I’m so grateful to the people at the shows,” he said. “We’re respecting ourselves and other people, just trying to do good.”