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BBorn in Stoke-on-Trent to a British mother and a Chinese-Malaysian father, then raised in Borneo and educated in Brunei, Bath and Cambridge, Phil Wang – or “Old Wang”, as he mockingly calls himself on stage – has certainly been there. Today, the 36-year-old stand-up comedian with a fun-loving air is in a cafe near his London home, dressed in black sweatpants, a blue shirt, salmon-colored New Balances and a baseball cap emblazoned with the words “Chump”. The most important thing is that he sports a mustache.
Wang made public appearances with front seats two years ago but the upcoming tour of his new show, Uh Oh, will be the first time he’s taken it out on the road. Is the tache here good? “Okay, I have five minutes to stand now,” he says over coffee. “Until I get a better five minutes, it will.”
It also announces one of Uh Oh’s themes. “The show is about aging, so the mustache is a symbol of trying to do it gracefully.” Age-related concerns have been noted in his experience. “People often think I’m older,” he said on stage a decade ago, “because even though I’m 26, I look… dangerous.” At 31, he joked: “I’m getting to the age where most of my friends have… podcasts.” Nor was there any comfort to be found in the forty-four things that prove that he was young: “Forgive me if I am not comforted in the face of death’s jealousy!
But Uh Oh talks about the changing culture of the mid-2020s. “I find aging a millennial fun,” he tells me. “This show is about the recent tail-end of the wake-up age — or at least the breakthrough — and how it’s gone with the millennials who have lost control of culture.” How is this happening to them? “Finding things on the Internet is incomprehensible.” Seeing people act so irrationally, sometimes I’m like, ‘I’m growing up. When it gets worse, it’s like, ‘No, I’ve turned into an old stutterer.’
If the mustache has drawn a hairline under Wang’s previous shows, it’s the title — unlike his Netflix special. Philly Philly Wang Wang and Wang In Umo, Baby! – is another departure sign. “Time to leave,” he repeats. That would be a good topic. He sees a picture: “I’m in the living room…” But the point is standing. “I decided to call it Vibe Shift Is Real. Culture moves very quickly, however, and the journey can last two years.
The change he is referring to is the dramatic shift in modernity to the right. “It’s in young men, gen Z based on the age they grew up in, and in older people who think the world around them has changed too fast. The re-election of Donald Trump was the last nail in politics. Millennials were shaped by millennials on social media; Twitter was a major engine of cultural restriction. millennials.”
Wang may be exactly what we need to cool down the heat of our burning season. As a balanced and entertaining comic, his innate technique is to affirm and reason with his audience rather than mocking them. This was very helpful especially when the progressive people were comfortable with all these issues of wrongdoing.” It’s a topic he touched on in his 2021 book Sidesplitter: How to Live From the World Together, in which he questioned, for example, the difference between the legal term “black man” and the verboten “black man”, writing that “it seems like a trap that is deliberately made to catch people”.
“The big problem with the left,” he says now, “is that they were so hungry for real victories that they got used to the small ones. Wang laughed ironically that he now calls himself a POC: “Phil, yes.”
I wonder how it feels to visit a country where people of color are the most affected. Besides, union jacks and St George flags will fly from lampposts in many of the towns and cities he visits. “In times of divisiveness, extremists and activists take advantage of people’s anxieties,” he said. But on an individual basis, people tend to be lenient. I’ve always thought that people are more complicated than the symbols they use. “
Recent events have warned him that he wants to live a better life in the UK. “You used to play somewhere and say, ‘This town is trash’, and people laugh. Now they get angry. They still like to hear that the town down the road is dirty, but they’ve protected their own people. They want to hear good things about themselves. I love this country too, and it makes me feel proud to be a traveller.”
His ambitions are still the same today as they were. “You want to do the best comedy you can to as many people as you can. I’ve never tried to be in that position. I’ve been a celebrity.” How do they interpret the difference? “Normal comedians think of the audience first; other comedians think of themselves first.”
Wang saw his fellow comedians being deceived by the love of being in a place that was not their culture. He approached himself in 2015. “My show that year was trying to be what I thought of as an Edinburgh show.” What is it? Something very sad. Mine was finding meditation and the struggles of a long distance relationship. Was it a demand for loyalty? I coined the term ‘Fringe Derangement Syndrome’ which means that when judges focus on just one month of judging, they start enjoying it.
Uh Oh will stand on the edge, but he does not lack other irons in the fire, including film work. The two-minute scene in Wonka, where she and Timothée Chalamet danced on adjacent tables, attracted a lot of attention on the Internet; he recently played the angry manager of a student union bar in the romcom Finding Emily. In his spare time, he has been reading PG Wodehouse’s Jeeves and Wooster stories. It’s like Frasier! I ask him if he started working on his own, and he looks at me curiously: “What makes you say that?” I say it’s the well-trodden path of the actors (Bob Mortimer, Julian Clary, Graham Norton) and they keep talking. “I really want to try.”
Who knows what it will be? Wang has been researching his background clearly throughout his career, as well Side Splitters and the award-winning Radio 4 Wangsplaining. But it’s not a matter of exhausting his writing, he says, so much as developing the ability to change the parts of the unknown.
“Sometimes you remember that you can’t do a routine until later. I remember playing an RPG (role-playing game) where you carry a level-30 sword at the beginning but you only get to level five and have to wait until you can use it.” Ah, I say, late pull: he’s talking about computer games. “Video games, yeah,” he says, directing my sotto voce. It’s a small but important opportunity for a millennial to give this type Xer a vocabulary lesson and prove that Old Wang isn’t so old.
