How Steven He transforms emotional damage into humor

“When ‘Asian’ Is a Difficult Mode” is the best-known example of He’s material—in which two dudes (both played by He) sit around a TV trying out a new console game, where the player character (also played by He) ragdolls to the ground, dead as a doornail, after a mere moment or two of play. We find out quickly that one of He’s characters set the game to its highest difficulty level, because, as his other character points out, “so many people in Asia complained it was too easy, so they made this”—and we cut to the game’s Select Difficulty menu, with the options of “Easy,” “Medium,” “Hard,” and “Asian.” Well now! That explains everything. Commence He, as the game’s avatar, collapsing to the ground, over and over, until real-life failure sets in and He, as one of the players, flops dead to the floor, too.

There’s a trick to pulling off comedy like this, so that the joke lands rather than falling flat on its face (as He’s characters do in the sketch). Triangulating three different roles helps: it lets the punchline reflect, back and forth and back again, from the players to the in-game avatar, right up until the final subtextual gag. Maybe being Asian is like playing a game on hard mode, and in that case, He’s repeated in-game deaths add up to a skill issue—a joke he tells at what’s ultimately his own expense, and not at the expense of all Asians everywhere. (After all, they’re presumably He’s target audience in the first place, unless he hopes to make white people laugh at his character’s absolute frailty.)

He applies this approach to much of his comedy, to the effect of opening a window into Asian experiences. Granted, Asians aren’t a monolith. Not everyone’s aunty does casual savagery like we see in “When ‘Asian’ Is a Difficulty Mode.” Not everyone packs school lunch like they’re self-serving their last meal, like in “How Asians Pack School Lunch,” in which He again plays each of the characters in the cast, and makes great use of his “I don’t believe it” facial expressions in response to escalating excesses in a midday meal. (The skit eventually turns into a promo for Bokksu, but this isn’t a faux pas to pin on He—that’s the creator economy, folks.) Bluntly, He’s own experiences as both Chinese and Irish are almost guaranteed to differ from others’. Born in Shenzhen in 1996, his family moved to Ireland in 2004, to the Limerick suburb of Castletroy. In time, he moved to London, then to the United States to pursue his acting career.

Now, the comic has 13.5 million subscribers on YouTube, where he parodies John Wick (take your shoes off before treading on his carpet, or else), shows off what would actually happen if Asians participated in Squid Game (they would dominate), and cleanses mischievous spirits from his house without the aid of even a single rooster. (Incidentally, He’s next movie, Kung Fu Deadly, features a jiangshi, and on paper descends from 1980s Hong Kong horror comedies like Ricky Lau’s Mr. Vampire series.) He’s made sequels to “When ‘Asian’ Is a Difficult Mode,” too, and why not? It’s the video that rocketed him to prominence. But try and spare He the emotional damage of being pigeonholed; he has more jokes to tell than that, besides.