The Comedy of Pain, and Korean Food

The comedian Youngmi Mayer didn’t mean to bring a cockroach into a downtown Manhattan food hall.

And maybe she didn’t. But when one scampered across her body, under the table and out into the wild, she just assumed, in an assuredly self-deprecating way, that she was its host. “I’m like 99 percent sure that it was in my coat the whole time,” she said. “My apartment is so cockroach infested that they’re like my pets now. I mean, I try to clean, but they just won’t go away,” especially after construction in front of her Chinatown building unloosed them. “I’ve given up. They’re hanging out with me now. They’re coming to my interviews.”

Later, she named him Herman and called him her “emotional support cockroach.”

Mayer is not easily embarrassed; she traffics in dispelling shame. She has built a following on TikTok and Instagram with unfiltered posts, often about her Korean American identity, in character as what she calls “the messy bitch that loves drama.”

She riffs — mercilessly, often in subtitled Korean — about gender standards, race and class, and frequently satirizes the hierarchies and clueless customers of the Asian dining scene, for which she had a ringside seat as an owner of the hotshot restaurant Mission Chinese, with the chef Danny Bowien, her ex-husband. She is also equally liable to weep for two minutes about a sweet old sandwich delivery guy.

As a podcast host, most notably with the series “Feeling Asian,” where she and the comedian Brian Park interviewed Asian American artists, she has addressed emotional health frankly and inspired a community of listeners (and podcasters) to do the same. Now she has another platform, with “I’m Laughing Because I’m Crying,” a memoir published this month by Little, Brown. It’s less about jokes and more about unpacking generational trauma. But for Mayer that, too, is foundational for comedy.