Comedian Dan Yang has done stand-up in nice rooms ("people with real jobs and they're on a nice date"), grungy rooms ("a bunch of drunk dudes"), Manhattan rooms ("tourists"), and even Jersey rooms ("a bunch of moms in their 50s and 60s.") But nowhere has loved him quite like they do on the internet. Yang has amassed more than 114,000 followers on Instagram thanks to his deadpan, straight-to-camera delivery of big-picture thoughts on life, bits like, "I think we've made all the music," and often, psychedelic musings on basketball. (In a recent clip, Yang wondered about what DJ Khaled could have been typing so furiously on his phone during Monday's Knicks game: "He only knows a few phrases.")
Though Yang considers himself a stand-up first and foremost, he said that a solid online following like his "definitely helps" when trying to get time on New York City stages. Yang grew up in the Bay Area and began doing improv comedy while he was a student at UCLA. He moved to New York in 2015 and started hitting up open mics with a former roommate. "I never made the conscious decision to be like, 'I'm going to be a stand-up now,'" Yang said. "I kind of just started doing it, and then before you know it, you're doing it all the time, and all your friends are also comics, and most of your life revolves around just going out and doing comedy stuff."
At that time, Yang's main hangout was Creek & The Cave in Long Island City, a long-running restaurant and comedy club which packed up and moved to Austin during the COVID pandemic. The pandemic changed online comedy, too, and like many of his contemporaries, Yang was attempting to break through on social media. At that time, he says, comedians shifted from workshopping their jokes on Twitter to making funny videos for TikTok and Instagram Reels.
"When the first batch of comedian social media people started popping up, everyone kind of hated it," Yang said. "But then you can't really hate on something if you're not even trying it."
Still, Yang conceded that "it's cringe and lame to do. But it's free to do, and it costs you nothing." I offered that short-form video comedy probably seemed cringe and lame at the time because people were new to it, and so a lot of comedians were all kind of doing the same thing. Now that people like Yang have made it their own, it feels more authentic. "It's definitely more socially acceptable," he said, "but every time I post something, I'm like, 'God, this sucks.'" He compared it to building muscle at the gym, and he treats it that way, making sure to post a video every week.
Yang sounded more enthused giving his taxonomy of the comedy mini-scenes in New York City—Brooklyn being a little more "quote-unquote-woke," with a stereotype that "you can't really push it," and Manhattan being "a little more vulgar, a little more racy."
