Advertisement

Phil Wang, headliner of the Evening Standard’s Big Comedy Night in association with Uber, on finding his voice

Phil Wang headlines the Evening Standard Big Comedy Night in association with Uber  (PHOTOGRAPHY NATASHA PSZENICKI)
Phil Wang headlines the Evening Standard Big Comedy Night in association with Uber (PHOTOGRAPHY NATASHA PSZENICKI)

Phil Wang has always been an outsider. When he was President of the Footlights Society at Cambridge, he was the only engineering student in it. The last engineering student to make their mark in comedy was Rowan Atkinson. A tough act to follow, but if anyone can handle the pressure, Wang can.

He is currently tucking into avocado on toast in a Kensington cafe and is in an upbeat mood, excited that the stand-up circuit is returning after its enforced Covid sabbatical. Next week he headlines the Evening Standard’s Big Comedy Night in association with Uber at the Underbelly Festival, Cavendish Square on September 7, supported by Jessica Fostekew, Huge Davies and Evelyn Mok, with Celebrity Gogglebox star Babatúndé Aléshé compering.

It is a bill that reflects the diversity of both London and the London comedy scene. Aléshé, for example, has Nigerian parents. Mok was born in Sweden to Chinese immigrants and now lives here. Wang’s civil engineer father is Malaysian, his archaeologist mother is from Stoke-on-Trent.

Wang moved to the UK permanently from Malaysia when he was 16, although he was actually born in the same Staffordshire hospital as Robbie Williams, albeit sixteen years later, during a family stay. As he writes, his mother and father named him Phil because they were up against a tight deadline to register him: “My parents pulled my name out of a hat.”

Phil Wang performing his Netflix special, Philly Philly Wang Wang (Matt Frost)
Phil Wang performing his Netflix special, Philly Philly Wang Wang (Matt Frost)

England was a culture shock for the newly-arrived teen. He had previously attended an international school in Brunei with students from all over the world. By contrast his public school was racially homogenous: “It was like I had been living in Star Wars and was suddenly transported to Downton Abbey.”

Race is important to him. He talks entertainingly about it in his debut Netflix special, Philly Philly Wang Wang and writes eloquently about the precariousness of straddling ethnicities in his upcoming “part memoir”, Sidesplitter: How To Be From Two Worlds At Once. “The book is fundamentally about what it’s like to be mixed race and from different countries,” he elaborates.

The fresh-faced comic looks barely into his twenties, but in his stand-up, he quips that at 31 he feels that time is catching up with him: “I’m at an age where all my friends are having… podcasts”.

His one-liners can be pleasingly smutty (“Have you ever done a fart so bad you lost a bar of wifi?”) but often come with a subtext of seriousness. In Sidesplitter, he notes how he gets asked where he is from when in Malaysia as well as in London.

The book was commissioned before lockdown, but it was the pandemic that gifted him the time to write it. After the live comedy circuit fell off a cliff he had an empty calendar: “I lost all the structure to my life. The book was already in the pipeline, but I’d been too busy. I think in lockdown, you either had a baby or you wrote a book. Both take about nine months.”

Being able to focus on something creative helped to take his mind off the absence of gigs. He had been due to film his Netflix special in May 2020 but Covid scuppered that. It was finally filmed at the Palladium this June in front of a socially distanced audience, who enjoyed the show so much they made as much noise as a full house.

Because of the delay Wang tweaked the material, dropping some local references and adding a Covid intro, which was shrewd. The special is streaming globally and if there is one experience that is universal it is Covid, whereas a reference to the Slug And Lettuce might not play so well in Kuala Lumpur: “Why is he talking about slugs and lettuces?” smiles Wang, thinking about his demographic on the other side of the planet.

The process of writing a book and a show were very different. You can hardly preview a book in a pub: “They are exercising different muscles. The book is certainly more erudite than the stand-up. Stand-up is written onstage, essentially, with feedback from audiences. Whereas the book, I only got to show to a couple of people once or twice before it was out. So I spent a lot more time making sure I chose the best possible words.”

It is no surprise he excels on both stage and page. Wang is a passionate comedy connoisseur. He grew up watching French And Saunders, Blackadder and The Brittas Empire on Malaysian television and did his first gig at the age of 17, when his family moved to Bath: “a spa town for people who find Cheltenham too ethnic”.

Phil Wang headlines Evening Standard’s Big Comedy Night in association with Uber at the Underbelly Festival, Cavendish Square (PHOTOGRAPHY NATASHA PSZENICKI)
Phil Wang headlines Evening Standard’s Big Comedy Night in association with Uber at the Underbelly Festival, Cavendish Square (PHOTOGRAPHY NATASHA PSZENICKI)

After A levels he landed a place at King’s College, Cambridge. He knew there was a very good engineering course there, but also knew that the Footlights had kickstarted the careers of icons from Peter Cook to Fry and Laurie and, more recently, Richard Ayoade. “When I started I thought comedy would be a fun thing to explore, but engineering was the plan. That was the set of tracks I was on. But I just got completely addicted to comedy. When other people were out clubbing I stayed in watching stand-up.”

He knuckled down to both his studies and his performances, getting an agent before he had even graduated. “Arts degrees give you free time to focus on acting and writing and then just work hard at exam time. With engineering, I had to be in the lab every morning at nine until whatever time. The second year of university was the hardest I’ve ever worked.” This probably explains why relationships took a back seat. Or as he jokes: “I didn’t have sex at university for religious reasons. God hates me.”

Wang is looking forward to headlining at the Underbelly Festival alongside such a gold-standard bill. The comedy circuit has changed dramatically since he first started. He is at the forefront of a wave of comedians from disparate backgrounds making their mark in front of appreciative fans: “I think my generation is more comfortable in a diverse environment. We’ve been exposed to different lives and stories and people from different backgrounds from a young age.” This outsider is now a front runner.

The Evening Standard Big Comedy Night in association with Uber is on September 7 at Underbelly Festival, Cavendish Square. Get your tickets at underbellyfestival.co.uk/whats-on/big-comedy-night. Sidesplitter is published on September 16. Phil Wang’s stand-up special is on Netflix. More info at philwang.co.uk.

Read More

Evening Standard Big Comedy Night in association with Uber: Let’s get London laughing again

Babatúndé Aléshé: the MC of the Evening Standard Big Comedy Night in association with Uber is on a roll

Evening Standard Big Comedy Night in association with Uber Q&A: Huge Davies

Evening Standard Big Comedy Night in association with Uber Q&A: Evelyn Mok