Atsuko Okatsuka has largely been the architect of her own success. During the long stretches of Covid lockdowns, when most of us sought comfort on our phones, the Los Angeles-based standup comedian began connecting directly with audiences by performing jokes straight to camera, filming short skits and, most famously, choreographing dance routines with her cheerful grandmother, Li (who, like Okatsuka, has accrued thousands of online followers).
Okatsuka is now instantly recognisable, for both her signature bowl cut and as the creator of the “drop challenge” – a squat dance set to Beyoncé’s Partition that Okatsuka has performed everywhere, in grocery stores, cafes and lifts – with celebrities including Serena Williams and Kerry Washington joining in.
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The response was enough to make her feel she could tour the world: when we speak, Okatsuka has just arrived in Jakarta, in the midst of a run of sold-out shows across south-east Asia and Australia.
“I was like, ‘I have an audience, I’m sure of it’ because they were showing up for me online – surely they would show up for me in person too,” she says.
In this way, Okatsuka, who is Taiwanese and Japanese, says she circumvented industry racism: by connecting directly with people online, streaming executives had no choice but to follow.
“If we let the people speak, then representation is fast because the people are diverse,” she says. “If it’s up to the executives, they would say, ‘Well, we only do one Ali Wong every 10 years. Why would we do a second person?’”
In 2022, Okatsuka became just the second Asian-American woman to get her own HBO comedy special, 22 years after Margaret Cho. In The Intruder, Okatsuka deftly jokes about her social and cultural anxieties while telling her story: of growing up with her mother, whose schizophrenia went undiagnosed for many years, and her grandmother’s decision to move them all from Japan to the US when Okatsuka was eight. She was told it was a two-month holiday, but the family stayed and lived as undocumented migrants.
The Intruder was critically acclaimed, and named the best debut comedy show of the year by the New York Times. It also attracted strong emotional reactions from audience members; she remembers one man who handed her $100 after the show and told her: “Take your mum out for me. My mum passed away but she had schizophrenia too and what was important for me was the times we could feel like we were normal.”
Okatsuka says: “It’s essentially an hour of standup comedy and stories about if you’ve ever felt like an outsider, whatever made you feel like a freak as a kid or when you were younger – that thing is your superpower.”
Feeling like an outsider is an essential core of all comedians, she says, although she wears it perhaps more literally than others. Her bowl cut – a hairstyle that has gained its own cult following, with fans donning black bowl-cut wigs – and her bold clothes were exactly the choices she shied away from as a child because she was paralysed by the fear of standing out.
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“Now I get to wear it and it’s chic-AF,” she says, matter-of-factly.
Her comedy style swings rapidly between awkward and wildly silly; her first comedy heroes were Cho and Tig Notaro, and she initially tried to emulate Notaro’s deadpan delivery before realising it didn’t work for her.
“I’m not a one-dimensional person. I get really excited and speak really high and fast – and loud,” she says. “Even since my special, I feel like I keep becoming more of my actual real self on stage.
“I think I still perform with some Asian roots that I didn’t even notice before,” she says, referring to her cartoonish-like energy that took inspiration from watching Robin Williams’ spirited routines. “I’m a very physical performer, I communicate a lot with my eyes or I make funny noises with my mouth to show frustration or fear or something … I don’t need to use words necessarily to communicate and I think that’s why there’s an instant connection globally that’s happening.”
Full Grown, the show she is currently touring across Australia, leaves some of the narrative complexity of The Intruder behind, and is a return to “the drawing board of my love for standup comedy”, Okatsuka says. It largely focuses on her reckoning with adulthood and navigating its logistical absurdities.
“To me, adulthood is just all paperwork – signing your name on things, making sure you read everything or else you might get stuck in a bad situation,” she says. “You never learned things like that in school. Why didn’t they tell us? Why did we learn geometry for that long?”