Anna Akana performs at her show, It Gets Darker. Courtesy of Insignia Presents
In turning pain into punchlines, Anna Akana is an expert.
Anna Akana began her sold-out show in Samsung Hall, SM Aura last February with the question: “Are you guys ready for an hour of trauma dumping?”
And so trauma dumping, the Zillennial slang describing the inappropriate tendency to overshare painful experiences, followed, but no real tears were shed. Accompanied by an energetic opening act by queer comedian Baus Rufo, Anna treated the audience to an hour of dark humor, including bits about an obsessive stalker; how fathers will do anything, even volunteering as a soldier for the Russia-Ukraine war, to avoid therapy; and why women’s suicidal thoughts still tend to mansplain.
“I think humor has been one of people’s best defenses for living in a hellscape, especially in America,” the comedian and actress told Vogue Philippines in an online interview. “Your only choices are to laugh or to cry. For the most part, you’re going to cry eventually. So for the rest of the time, you just want to laugh and find the lightness in it. Otherwise, you kind of have a mental breakdown and go insane.”
Anna, whose father is Japanese while her mother is from the Philippines, first started her comedy stints on YouTube more than a decade ago. The California native recalled that it was during this time when emerging acts such as Ryan Higa, Wong Fu, Kevin Wu, and Michelle Phan were using the internet to diversify representation for Asian-Americans due to a lack of mainstream portrayals.
One of the videos that shot the 35-year-old to popularity was ‘Why Guys Like Asian Girls,’ which pokes at the stereotype of Asian women being submissive or kawaii. The skit was posted in 2014, and many more female content creators have since followed in posting satirical clips about their own misogynistic encounters, especially on TikTok.
“I think a lot of professional comedy is about learning how to flip the perceptions on you and play into them or negate them. It’s a lot of mental gymnastics. And I think it’s something men really don’t have to deal with most of the time,” said Anna. “Women have to figure out how to make everybody else comfortable constantly. And that is magnified in comedy.”
But the most significant catalyst for her comedy career was the death of her sister Kristina, who passed at the age of 13. The loss inspired her viral video ‘please don’t kill yourself,’ which was posted in 2013 and still recently receives comments like, “I [watched] this the first time at 12 years old, [and I’m] now rewatching at almost 22, so thank [you] for keeping me around for 10 more years.”
With around an average of 40 Filipinos taking their lives almost every month, it’s hard to imagine how to draw out gags from this sort of tragedy. Nonetheless, it was through this balancing act that Anna found the best punchlines without toeing into insensitivity.
“Ultimately, I have to make a group of people feel comfortable laughing about what is essentially like a dead kid. And to do that, it was a lot of experimentation with never wanting to punch down. I don’t even want to punch at myself. So it was this real Tetris of, ‘where can I put the joke? What vulnerable thing do I need to say to bring people in?’ But then how do I also reassure them that this is something I’ve done my work around and that they can laugh at it?”
When asked about what topic audiences are usually receptive to, it turns out that fans often come to Anna’s shows weighed down by suicide, whether they struggled with the thought themselves or know someone else who did. And it’s probably because of its taboo nature that’s leading people to comedy, aiming to cope and connect with others about such an isolating experience.
“One of the best comedy sets I attended was this guy who did a 15-minute stint about his dead brother,” recalled Anna. “And I was crying but also laughing because it was so specific and relatable to me. The rest of the audience was like, why the f— is this lady laughing so hard about this?”
“When you have something that you have so much sadness around, there’s this built-up pressure that never gets any kind of release. And that’s all comedy is: tension and release. So something that is as loaded as suicide, which tends to have so much sad tension around it, can get the biggest release from comedy. When dealing with death in general, we all still have a really hard time grappling with it, because we’re given no manual on how to deal with it.”
Beyond the absurdity of grief, Anna draws inspiration from fellow Millennial comedians, television, and TikTok. Nikki Glaser’s Golden Globes speech came up as a more recent influence, along with the performance of Jeremy Strong as media empire heir Kendall Roy in the series Succession (2018-2023). “I just thought, this guy’s pathetic and desperate, but I love him and want him to win. He’s the Shakespearean clown, for sure.”
If there’s anything that fans can take home from It Gets Darker, maybe it’s the ability to find lightness and renewed compassion for others in the tragic, even when it’s understandably impossible to do so.
Or it could also be about making the literal most out of shared misery. “It doesn’t matter what horrible thing happens to my life,” she quipped in the show. “I can monetize it!”
