These Filipino American women are using comedy to smash Asian stereotypes
Patricia Dinglasan, a former corporate beauty executive from the Bay Area, was pregnant with her second child when she decided to trade safety nets for punchlines.
Looking back, the now-48-year-old mother sees that the signs of her path to comedy were always there — she just chose to ignore them. In third grade, she says her parents were horrified when her teacher wrote a note saying, “Patricia is one the brightest students in class but often gets distracted being the class clown.”
“Maybe I didn’t pursue it because of what my parents wanted for me,” she tells NextShark. “My dad: be an engineer. My mom: marry rich and powerful. I had the only mom in the world who didn’t want her daughter to marry a doctor. She was an ambitious socialite in Manila so she preferred I marry a dictator.”
But Dinglasan believes she stayed long in the beauty industry for the career safety it provided. “Also… I got free La Mer and Jo Malone all the time. Is it really a corporate prison if you receive luxury beauty products?” she adds.
Initially, Dinglasan’s career aspirations were limited by what she thought was available to her as a Filipino woman in the U.S. It wasn’t until she found herself exhausted by her corporate job that she signed up for a stand-up comedy class, got her first laughs on stage and was instantly hooked. “Turns out the biggest obstacle I had to overcome was really myself,” she says.
Meanwhile, in the Big Apple, Kyle Marian, who went to New York University, was determined to become a famous scientist or the “Filipina Indiana Jones” as she would call it. “But then academia’s racism, sexism, favoritism and politics really jolted me out of that,” she shares.
It was while she was studying in Edinburgh, Scotland, that she stumbled upon a comedian’s set about the struggles of earning a Ph.D. and became inspired.
“It felt liberating and powerful, and I signed up immediately to spill my tea after that,” Marian says. “Since then, I found that comedy — stand-up, improv or sketch — was actually helping me break out of the model minority persona I built my academic self around. And now, I’m a nerdy comedian who sometimes dresses up as genitals to laugh about how we don’t do enough sex education as adults.”
Although the comedy space wasn’t exactly welcoming of Asian talent in the past, Marian and Dinglasan persevered with confidence. Dinglasan, in particular, used humor to challenge stereotypes, crafting jokes that played off common tropes. She joked about hypersexualization (“I dressed up as a sexy nurse for my husband. I said, ‘Take off all your clothes and have a seat,’ and then I left him in there for an hour.”), the tiger mom image (“I don’t care if my sons identify as he/him, she/her or they/them — as long as they is a doctor.”) and even Asian hate (“I noticed my pepper spray is made in the U.S., and I have to wonder, what’s the spice level of a pepper spray made in America? No offense, but I’ve seen some of you taken out by garlic.”).
In October 2020, Dinglasan produced a show with all-Filipino talents in Central Park for Filipino American History Month (FAHM) to address the lack of Asian — especially Asian women — comedians on lineups. The following summer, she teamed up with Marian to launch Banana Ketchup Comedy, which partners with Asian American small businesses to unite Filipino comedians and the community through good food and laughter.
“After the first big show in 2022, an audience member wrote to us, ‘Comedy was my savior and after seeing my first Banana Ketchup show, created by these pioneering Filipino American women, I left thoroughly believing I had found my tribe,’” Dinglasan recalls. “We knew we had created something really special. In our 2022 FAHM celebration, Dante Basco was a reference point on a slide for important dates in Filipino American history, and in less than two years, we were sharing the stage with him. Making one of the most iconic Fil-Ams in entertainment laugh was unforgettable for us and it felt like we were living a dream.”
Now in its second year, the Filipino Comedy Festival is celebrating its first-ever collaboration between East and West Coast Filipino comedy scenes. Dinglasan and Marian curated this year’s lineup by combining online submissions with outreach to established headliners, aiming to showcase the diversity within the Filipino community, emphasizing that Filipinos are not a monolith.
The festival features two different show formats: San Francisco, which took place from Oct. 4 to 5, had sold-out variety shows with the all-female, non-binary Asian improv group Granny Cart, plus musicians Rhoda Gravador and Herb Diggs. In New York City, the lineup from Oct. 17 to 19 blends comedy with education, including performances by Marian, headliner and former forensic scientist Ria Lina and Filipino historian Dr. Kevin Nadal, who brings his comedic past back to life.
“My goal is for everyone who goes to a show to laugh so hard that they hit the person next to them,” Dinglasan says. “I don’t know why we Filipinas do that, but I want it to be so funny it really hurts.”
“At least the odds are good that there will be a healthcare worker hero in the audience to save them if needed,” Marian adds.
The pair envision building a global network of Filipino comedians, fostering connection and community across the diaspora. They hope the festival can reach every pocket of the U.S. where Filipinos gather, and ideally, expand worldwide to entertain the broader community, including OFWs, immigrants and Filipinos back home.
“I’m trying to unlearn having limiting beliefs about what I can achieve as an Asian woman in comedy,” Dinglasan says, adding that she would love to “shoot a special with all Filipina comedians, sell it, so we all can become super famous and rich and powerful and get free clothes.” “When you don’t see what you want to become, you have to make it.”
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