#welcome to the Phil Wang Fan Club and it's just me

[freeasfishes]

thoughts on the casting for west endsies?

none of them are played by Phil Wang so I do not care

#/j #but also I only care about Phil Wang #the entire rest of the country is irrelevant #there is only Philly Philly Wang Wang #this is an old ask I'm sorry #I just forgot to answer it because every time I meant to I would think about Phil Wang and get distracted #west endsies #newsies live #I do think the guy playing jack is very very handsome however he isn't phil wang! so like I said I do not care /j #the UK has two things of value and those things are Phil Wang and Stampycat. /j #I just think Phil Wang is very hot and very funny and he should be so famous and they should make him prime minister #-it's bruce lee's game of death outfit so it's an homage to one of the most famous asian entertainers #AND also you get to see my dick and baaaallllsss!- #- I was being KIND to the elderly!- I think about that every day and laugh #he goes on taskmaster and brings HIMSELF as a prize and honestly BEST prize ever on that game #welcome to the Phil Wang Fan Club and it's just me #phil wang

[tellthemeerkatsitsfine]

Here is a post about what is going to happen to me in the next couple of weeks, because it is a really exciting schedule. The sort of schedule that I did not dare to dream of this time last year, with COVID being where it was. And I know it isn’t over. I have some very good KN95 masks that I am ready to take out of their package for this occasion, and I am still concerned that I will end up contacting COVID at some point. But I’ll try really hard not to, and it’s much much safer than it was a year ago, and it’s a risk I’ve decided to calculate as worth it.

First of all, for her birthday in 2020, my dad bought my mom tickets to see Hamilton with the caveat that he would only go with her if she could find absolutely no one else to go. My mom asked me, I said “I’m not into musicals or whatever but I hear this is a big deal so I guess I’ll go listen to the music from it”, and then came back and said “yeah all right that’s entertaining, I’ll go with you.” So we made plans to go see Hamilton together on June 11, 2020.

After that I listened to the songs more times, while psychologically forcing myself to push through my brain’s instinct to not be a fan of 1) musical theatre, 2) these genres of music that are so far outside what I normally listen to, 3) anything that earnest, and 4) anything that is also so beloved by the mainstream and just generally by everyone in the world apparently, and once I turned down those instincts in my brain as much as I could, I had to acknowledge that actually this is very good and I’m looking forward to seeing it live. I remember saying, in mid-March 2020, “I mean this lockdown is bad and I know it might last a while but it had better all be over by June 11. That’s ages away, it can’t last that long, right? Because in spite of myself I’ve started really looking forward to seeing Hamilton.”

The show has been postponed four different times since then. It is now, barring something catastrophic occurring in the next six days, going to actually happen on July 28, 2022. The tickets are still valid, my mother and I are still here, I’ve watched the filmed version they released with subtitles on so now I know what the words are supposed to be and will be able to better appreciate it once I get into the theatre and they’re all talking/singing too fast for me to catch every word. I am looking forward to this.

So that’s Thursday. On Wednesday the 27, both my parents and I are going to Montreal to see the Just For Laughs Brit(ish) show at 7 PM. Brit(ish) is a club-style show that features Tom Allen, Dara O’Briain, Fern Brady, Sindhu Vee, Phil Wang, and Nish Kumar, for a show that can’t last more than a couple of hours, so I imagine they’ll each be doing quite short sets. I know it can’t last more than a couple of hours because they’re doing another performance at 9:30, which is good because we also have tickets to see James Acaster’s Hecklers Welcome at 9:30.

That’s going to be a hell of a night. To be honest I’m surprised my mother agreed to come, given that we’re almost two hours from Montreal so it’s two shows in a row and a very late night. My dad and I share an interest in British comedy, he watched Cold Lasagne with me (not live, obviously) and said it’s some of the best stand-up he’s ever seen; he’d stay up all night with me to see James Acaster any night of the week. My mother normally gets annoyed when my dad and I put on Britcom all the time if I’m visiting their house, but as one exception to that, she’s gotten really into WILTY in the last year. So she’s also excited to see the guy from the cabbage thing live. Fun for the whole family! I mean… I have mentioned to her that his stand-up is going to be a bit different from his WILTY material. But actually, they are both a lot of stories about his life and mind being a mess.

So then I have one day at home on Friday, and then I am dragging my best friend back to Montreal to see Nish Kumar do his full show on Saturday night. This friend is definitely not into British comedy, he knows I enjoy my little comedians who talk with accents and thinks that’s fine, but 95% of why I originally created this blog was so I could start going on about them here instead of going on to him about them. But I convinced him to come to the show Saturday night anyway, and we are going to have a good time! If nothing else, he will hear Nish Kumar’s bit about being a “buzzkill in the group chat” (the one person in your friend group who’s more pessimistic and “okay but actually the larger implications of this thing you’re trying to have fun about are problematic” than your friends want to be), and then I can start referencing that to him whenever I act as a buzzkill in a group chat that he’s also in, which is often. This show starts at 10:30 PM, so should end near midnight and then another two-hour drive home, but my best friend coaches a team with me where we regularly travel 5 or more hours for out-of-town tournaments and get home in the middle of the night. So a night like that is not a big deal for him, unlike for my parents.

And then, the following week, my amazing, patient, intelligent girlfriend got us tickets to something much more sensible than a show that requires driving that far in the middle of the night: Katherine Ryan coming to our own city at 7 PM. One of the things my girlfriend and I have in common is the idea that just because we’re in a relationship doesn’t mean our dates need to involve leaving the house. But so far, we’ve had a wonderful exception to that when we saw Russell Howard live a few months ago. I am really looking forward to doing this again. We don’t do out-of-the-house date night often, but when we do, we do it very well. Date night: featuring Canada’s own Katherine Ryan.

I sometimes feel a bit guilty about how much entertainment I’ve taken from these comedians while very rarely financially compensating them for it. Well, that is ten tickets to four different comedy shows in one week, that have been purchased because of my obsession with British comedy. So consider the industry supported. You’re welcome, industry. I got my mother into WILTY and now she’s coming to a comedy festival to see two shows in a night, despite being too old for that shit. I even sent her the link to Dara O’Briain doing his catwalk thing on his WILTY episode, to be sure she’ll recognize him at the Brit(ish) show.

It’s going to be a great week, and of course I will let the good people of this site know how it goes, as much as I can. I will absorb as many memories as I can to comfort me during the many weeks of the year when comedians from across the world are not descending on my general area for that one comedy festival, and I hear British comedians plug their live shows on TV and think “God that sounds so good, fuck all the people who live over there and can see this stuff any time.”