Stream It Or Skip It: ‘Joel Kim Booster: Psychosexual’ On Netflix, How Relatable Does A Gay, Asian Comedian Need To Be, Anyhow?

Joel Kim Booster is having quite the hot gay summer, and summer is just getting started. Booster wrote, starred in and executive-produced the new movie Fire Island for Hulu, he’s got a role in the new Apple TV+ comedy, Loot, which premieres this weekend, and today, he has released his first solo stand-up hour for Netflix.

JOEL KIM BOOSTER: PSYCHOSEXUAL: STREAM IT OR SKIP IT?

The Gist: Netflix viewers may recognize Booster from any number of appearances providing commentary or jokes on the platform in recent years, including History of Swear Words, The Netflix Afterparty, and most recently Stand Out: An LGBTQ+ Celebration. (And some of you longtime Decider readers might remember Joel for the column that he used to write for us, Would You Rather?) For his first stand-up hour, Booster has structured the hour into a three-act performance, announcing the end of each act and singling out a straight white man in his audience to gauge his reaction to each of the three acts.
In Booster’s own words, the first act revolves around jokes specific to Booster’s identities as a gay man and as an Asian man. His second act includes all of his jokes he claims anyone could tell, regardless of their identity. For his third act, he’s reserved his most explicit and graphic jokes about sex. Which act would Ben (the audience member) prefer the most or least? Which act will resonate most with you?

What Comedy Specials Will It Remind You Of?: Booster, 34, is part of a wave of young comedians who are unabashedly out and proudly sexual. Among others you could find on Netflix now: Matteo Lane and John Early.
Memorable Jokes: Because Booster engages in multiple forms of crowd work throughout the hour, those interactions naturally stand out.

In addition to Ben, whom Booster picked to act as a surrogate for all straight white men who knew little to nothing about the comedian before seeing and hearing him tell jokes, there’s also: the Korean woman whom Booster leaned on to tell him which other Asians their Korean grandparents have racist hatred toward (since Booster himself was adopted by a white middle-American Baptist family); the Vietnamese man with a white boyfriend, who serves as a segue for Booster’s jokes about “rice queens” who have Asian fetishes; and the straight couple, upon whom Booster tests their monogamy through a series of hypothetical situations.
Our Take: Booster claimed he worries about his relatability, but to whom? Is he too gay, too Asian for a mainstream heterosexual audience? Or is he too reared in white American traditions to not relate to his Korean or even Asian peers? By the end of the set, he said he “mostly just wanted to come up here and be stupid and make people laugh,” and whether he can represent gays or Asians as a role model or as a comedian is secondary to that.
And yet, that’s not the feeling one comes away with listening to all of his jokes.
Booster ended his first act with the notion that his code-switching to blend in, whether it’s at a P.F. Chang’s in Boise or in the back seat of a cab service, is part and parcel to his upbringing as a visible minority, and the anxiety over whether the majority will take anything he does or says and attribute that as a stereotype of his ethnicity or even his sexuality.
But the jokes and stories he most enjoys sharing involve drugs, partying, sex, and oftentimes all three in one. Sure, there are some jokes about dogs and cats that just about any comedian could tell, but those jokes are vastly outnumbered by revelations about Booster’s sex life and masturbation practices. And if the audience doesn’t get it, he’s fine with that, too. After one bit, he informed his phone the joke bombed, then turned to a camera and instructed “Janine” to leave the bit in the special. Why? “This is my Netflix special, and some of the jokes are just for me.”
Later, Booster suggested perhaps dropping a joke about how the bipolar community claimed the abbreviation bi before bisexuals could (an ironic twist, considering a Washington Post reporter just got suspended for ReTweeting a bipolar/bisexual joke).
But Booster retains his command of the stage and the audience throughout. Most tellingly, when they applaud his observation about queer women never complaining about a lack of orgasms, he snapped: “I will not let this descend into clapter — you either laugh and clap, or none, OK?”

Our Call: STREAM IT. No need to worry about Booster’s clapter ultimatum. You will laugh, even if you’re not gay or Asian.

Sean L. McCarthy works the comedy beat for his own digital newspaper, The Comic’s Comic; before that, for actual newspapers. Based in NYC but will travel anywhere for the scoop: Ice cream or news. He also tweets @thecomicscomic and podcasts half-hour episodes with comedians revealing origin stories: The Comic’s Comic Presents Last Things First.