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Los Angeles Times
15-04-2025
- Entertainment
- Los Angeles Times
Facing cancer and blindness, L.A.'s Alex Duong fights to keep his sight and stand-up spirit
Comic, writer and actor Alex Duong has been a member of SAG-Aftra since 2009. He became a door guy at the Comedy Store in 2021, dedicated to transforming himself into a self-described 'road dog' with a full hour of jokes under his belt and headlining shows on the calendar. Comedy was helping pay his family's bills, or at least most of them. Even with 'Blue Bloods,' 'Pretty Little Liars,' Netflix's 'Historical Roasts' and the streamer's Netflix Is a Joke festival, it was still difficult to meet guild minimums for health insurance. In January, Duong was set to perform across 41 states through the year, some dates with 'The Daily Show' correspondent Ronny Chieng. Donnie Wahlberg, whom Duong worked with across a 'Blue Bloods' three-season arc, told him to be prepared for an upcoming spinoff. When fires spread across Los Angeles, ash rained down on his family's West L.A. apartment. He saw friends lose their homes, possessions, everything they'd worked for. The city was on edge. It was always risky trying to make it in Los Angeles. Since COVID it was all but impossible, and in an instant it could all be gone. A headache built behind his eyes. He switched his contacts for glasses. Duong was nine years sober and otherwise healthy. He probably just needed some downtime, decompressing, healthy juices and vitamin D to get him back on track. When the Store reopened, Duong returned for his door guy shift. He immediately got stares. His manager pulled him aside, telling him, 'Your left eye looks like it's about to fall out. You should go home.' His wife Christina did a double take, echoing, 'Alex, what's wrong with your eye?' In the mirror it was massive, taut and discolored. Diagnosed with alveolar rhabdomyosarcoma, a rare and aggressive cancer affecting soft tissue, Duong has a malignant mass blocking blood flow to his optic nerve. He has been supported by Comedy Gives Back, a community nonprofit spearheaded by Amber J. Lawson, Jodi Lieberman and Zoe Friedman, and a GoFundMe initiated by Hilarie Steele. 'It makes me cry because I know people are struggling so hard right now, and they're still giving,' he says of the donations received. The $5 amount given under the fake name Chris D'Elia, however, had him laughing for the first time in months. Duong's family, including 4-year-old daughter Everest, didn't have health insurance. They'd struggled to afford it. 'It was easier to pay the fine when you pay your taxes than to pay $12K a year,' Duong says. He signed up for and waited until marketplace insurance kicked in to visit the emergency room at St. John's, where Everest was born. After a week in the hospital, a biopsy was performed and his tumor labeled as extremely aggressive, something needing immediate attention. St. John's provided an eye patch and scheduled treatment two months in the future. 'And this is with a PPO,' Duong notes. Ophthalmology wasn't an area of St. John's expertise. 'If you want a clean comedy show, you don't book Doug Stanhope,' he jokes. 'You're not gonna book the Legion of Skanks for your Toyotathon.' Duong was discharged, sent home and told to return in another week. He hung out with his family over the weekend. By Monday, the vision in his left eye was gone. After 2 ½ additional weeks at St. John's, Duong felt he was 'just being fed and given drugs, sitting there getting fat and missing my family.' He signed out and took an Uber from St. John's to UCLA at 2 in the morning. Duong now has a UCLA sarcoma specialist. He's undergoing a second round of chemotherapy and receiving white blood cell injections to aid his immune system. His thick black hair, a personal point of pride and frequent topic of jokes, began falling out in asymmetrical patches on the sides and in back and is now fully shaved. 'I look like a tsunami going down on my wife,' he'd previously joked onstage. Now with chemo side effects, 'I'm gonna end up looking like the Last Airbender. Or the fattest Air Gender Bender.' Duong has been told rhabdomyosarcoma has a low survival rate, about five years. The mass behind his eyeball traces into his nasal cavity and side of his neck. A version of electro-acupuncture is helping. A specialist in Irvine recommended hugging his daughter close every night. All she understands at the moment is that her daddy is sick. Duong can't drive and is afraid he's going to accidentally injure people near him. Comic and neighbor Frank Castillo has been lending Duong support while simultaneously navigating his own father's cancer diagnosis. 'The thing that I love about Alex is he doesn't quit,' Castillo says. 'He constantly strives to get better. Not just as a comic, but as a human being, I've watched him become a father to a daughter that's softened his heart. Alex has a big ol' soft heart and loves to pretend he doesn't.' Though Duong feels the tumor shrinking and the size of his eye has receded, he still has monocular vision. In his left field of vision, 'I just see black feathers.' If treatment is successful, he will eventually require extremely risky orbital reconstruction surgery. A donor nerve, or a full donor eye, may be required. He currently owes more than $400,000 in medical costs. 'I love this city and everything it's given me,' Duong says. But in recent years, 'Angelos have been left to fend for themselves and each other.' He hates being told that he's strong. 'I don't want to be strong!' he says. 'I just want to go tell my d— jokes, make people laugh and hang out with my family.' For Duong, family extends to performers who have reached out. 'Comedians always have each other's backs when times are s—. We know how hard it is to pine and struggle and scrape by in this lifestyle, just so we can do these jokes and keep improving. It's a beautiful thing to see in this world; it really is.'
Yahoo
13-03-2025
- Entertainment
- Yahoo
‘Everybody's Live with John Mulaney' Turns a One-Off Experiment Into Consistently Delightful Chaos: TV Review
'Everybody's Live with John Mulaney' isn't quite a new show. Instead, the series is the evolution of 'Everybody's in LA,' a pop-up concept — and apparently, trial run — timed to the Netflix Is a Joke festival last year. After producing six episodes in eight days, Mulaney took 10 months to retool the series into something less hyper-regional but no less idiosyncratic. '10 months is the perfect amount of time to forget how to do this show,' Mulaney joked in his monologue. But the next hour made clear the comedian and his collaborators forgot, and in fact changed, very little from that initial sprint. (That Mulaney referred to — and kept referring to — 'Everybody's in LA' as 'this show,' not a separate one, was an accurate preview.) Richard Kind is still the announcer; the hour's centerpiece is still an expanding panel pairing celebrities with non-famous experts in their field; Mulaney still asks callers what kind of car they drive, because while everybody may no longer be in LA, he certainly is. The '70s-inspired set on a Hollywood soundstage proved a metaphor for the transition from one-off experiment to a three-month run of a dozen weekly episodes: mostly the same, with minor tweaks only apparent to a small subset of nerdy aficionados. More from Variety Joan Baez Pauses John Mulaney's Talk Show to Slam 'Incompetent Billionaires' Running America: 'Our Democracy Is Going Up in Flames' John Mulaney's Star-Studded 'SNL50' Musical Sketch Includes Hot Dog Adam Driver, Kate McKinnon's Giuliani and Scarlett Johansson Joking About Colin Jost Steve Martin's 'SNL50' Monologue Sees Martin Short Arrested by ICE, John Mulaney Joking About Hosts' Egos: 'It Amazes Me That Only Two Have Committed Murder' That's great news for fans like myself, having named 'Everybody's in LA' one of the best shows of last year in my annual roundup. It's nonetheless surprising how non-expository Wednesday's technical debut was. The presence of Saymo the delivery robot, for example, went unexplained. Mulaney's four-wheeled friend needed no introduction for those who watched the bug-eyed apparatus develop into a full-fledged character last spring, but neophytes dropping in on a major launch from a worldwide streamer may have been left scratching their heads. Mulaney may have cracked that the name change came after focus groups showed audiences didn't like LA, but nothing else about the show felt focus-grouped or planned with mass appeal in mind. 'Everybody's Live' takes after its five-member panel, in part because the discussion took up the majority of the episode: often odd and offbeat, yet in a way that allows for a transcendent weirdness when the stars align. Without the ability to edit down and tighten a pre-taped segment, the chit-chat between actor Michael Keaton and personal finance columnist Jessica Roy on the night's selected topic — lending money to friends and family — could wander aimlessly. (Keaton sort of flubbed his delivery of a story about Jack Nicholson's '$500 junkie buyout' strategy, although his impression was pretty great.) Yet we were also treated to folk singer Joan Baez narrating the time she crashed her brand-new Tesla into an oak tree, much to the in-studio audience's delight. Part of what made 'Everybody's in LA' so exciting was in how it took the cultural decline of the talk show as an opportunity. Rather than subjecting itself to the endless grind of daily headlines or relying on stars' promotional schedules to book guests, the show would embrace the niche fascination its genre was already trending toward — treating 'talk show' like an aesthetic to be tried on and toyed with, not a set of expectations to be met. 'Everybody's Live' maintains this spirit of chaos and curiosity, with all the risks that come with it. Despite a more regular schedule than its predecessor, the show is in no danger of becoming Netflix's answer to 'Late Night' or 'The Tonight Show.' Broadening the focus from Los Angeles and its many contradictions to more general prompts has its growing pains. I didn't feel the same infectious enthusiasm from Mulaney for financial etiquette as, say, the O.J. Simpson case. On the other hand, it would be difficult to shoehorn a Willy Loman focus group into a Southern California-themed broadcast. That sketch, coming just before the episode's closing performance by Cypress Hill, was the hour's peak, containing all the promise of petty obsessions afforded airtime in a chorus of besuited actors shouting a monologue as one. 'Everybody's Live' will continue to have hiccups as it eases into its new schedule, because hiccups are built into the blueprint of a show that solicits live callers and has the host react in real time. (I have some follow-up questions about the Redondo Beach trainer's high-tech workout.) For all Mulaney's self-deprecation, though, there's still a confidence to picking right back up where he left off almost a year ago. Nothing else on TV vibrates at the same frequency as 'Everybody's Live,' née 'Everybody's in LA.' It's on us to attune ourselves. Best of Variety The Best Albums of the Decade
The Hill
10-03-2025
- Entertainment
- The Hill
Comedian of Trump rally fame gets Netflix deal
Tony Hinchcliffe, the comedian who made multiple controversial jokes at a Trump rally in October, has received a Netflix deal. 'Kill Tony is coming to Netflix. We're teaming up with Tony Hinchcliffe to turn the world's #1 live podcast into 3 exclusive comedy specials – with the first premiering April 7,' Netflix's 'Netflix Is a Joke' account on the social platform X posted on Monday. At a Trump rally in New York City's Madison Square Garden last year, Hinchcliffe delivered jokes aimed at Jewish people, Black people and the island of Puerto Rico. Hinchcliffe's racist comments about the U.S. territory drew quick backlash from both ends of the political spectrum. 'There's a lot going on. Like, I don't know if you know this, but there's literally a floating island of garbage in the middle of the ocean right now. I think it's called Puerto Rico,' Hinchcliffe said at the rally. A Trump campaign senior adviser had said that the 'joke does not reflect the views of President Trump or the campaign.' Rep. Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez (D-N.Y.), who is of Puerto Rican descent, slammed the joke shortly after Hinchcliffe delivered it. 'And I need people to understand … when you have some a-hole calling Puerto Rico 'floating garbage,' know that that's what they think about you,' she said Rep. Ritchie Torres (D-N.Y.) also chimed in, saying he was 'tempted to call Hinchcliffe racist garbage but doing so would be an insult to garbage.' 'When casting their ballots at the voting booth, Latinos should never forget the racism that Donald Trump seems all too willing to platform,' Torres added in a post on X.
Washington Post
11-02-2025
- Entertainment
- Washington Post
A comedian who delivers jokes with moral clarity and a sharp tongue
Next in Arts & Entertainment A comedian who delivers jokes with moral clarity and a sharp tongue By Ashley Fetters Maloy February 11, 2025 at 6:00 a.m. EST 0 Sorry, a summary is not available for this article at this time. Please try again later. There's a joke Caleb Hearon likes to tell about trans people — and if that sounds like an alarming way to begin, keep reading. It's an observational bit about an aesthetic difference between trans men and trans women. 'Trans guys always pick something proper. They'll be like, 'I'm Elliott.' 'I'm Liam.' 'I'm E.J.'' Hearon says. Trans women, he says, just go for it, calling themselves unprintable anatomical slang terms before phantasmagorical titles like 'Goddess Amethyst of the Rainforest.' Nobody loves this joke more than the transgender fans at his shows, Hearon says, over lunch on a sunny autumn afternoon in Brooklyn. The actor and (cheekily self-described) 'beloved gay comedian' has been headlining packed comedy venues, prompting howls of laughter with subversive punch lines like, 'Being bisexual is the new being Italian — a lot of wearing leather jackets and pretending to be discriminated against.' For years, better-known figures in comedy have struggled to make relevant, topical, good jokes about the so-called 'issues' of sexuality and gender identity. Many wind up either offending audiences or just failing to make them laugh. Hearon, though, sidesteps both of those common pitfalls, and he makes it look easy. Hearon, a 30-year-old native of Brookfield, Missouri, performed two dozen shows across the United States in 2024 and launched a weekly talk-show podcast titled 'So True.' (Its tagline, in Hearon's signature faux-affectatious young person's syntax: 'Basically just getting into it and sorting it all out and kind of identifying what's really real.') Hearon also headlined the 2024 'Netflix Is a Joke' festival and appeared in supporting roles in the recent comedies 'I Used to Be Funny,' starring Rachel Sennott, and 'Sweethearts,' starring Kiernan Shipka and Nico Hiraga. He begins a U.S. tour later this month. Story continues below advertisement Advertisement Hearon's most remarkable achievement, however, may be his constant illustrations of how deftly a gifted comedian can navigate changing social mores. While comedy elder statesmen like Dave Chappelle and Jerry Seinfeld have in the past claimed audiences are just too sensitive nowadays, Hearon's burgeoning career is proof that comedy can have a moral compass — and still be funny. Hearon's initial plan was to be a lawyer. But while studying sociopolitical communication at Missouri State University and working in the Kansas City office of Sen. Claire McCaskill (D), he discovered improv comedy. After graduation in 2017, Hearon moved to Chicago and started a comedy career instead. 'I was like, 'I think I'm going to try comedy, and I'll give it my 20s,'' he remembers. 'And if I never make a dime and I end up, like, tucking my tail between my legs and going to law school in my 30s, at least for the rest of my life I can tell my kids and my friends and everyone that I spent my 20s being weird in Chicago with a bunch of cool people.' In the meantime, Hearon also worked at a nonprofit helping teachers in low-income districts to integrate social justice and service learning into their curriculums. Caleb Hearon performs at South by Southwest in Austin in 2023. () After three years on Chicago's comedy scene, Hearon abruptly became internet famous during the coronavirus pandemic in 2020 when viewers discovered short front-facing videos he had previously released on Twitter. The videos portrayed Hearon having one side of a conversation, inviting viewers into a variety of plausible but amusingly weird situations. 'POV: You're a close friend venting to me about a situation where you were entirely in the wrong.' 'POV: You're my co-worker and I'm telling you the first part of an entire weekend I spent with our other co-worker.' Story continues below advertisement Advertisement Joel Kim Booster, an actor and comedian as well as Hearon's castmate in 'Sweethearts,' first encountered Hearon's work around that time. 'This was early days for this kind of comedy video. I really do think he was at the forefront there. And I, like most people, was obsessed,' Booster says. 'I was always like, 'How do you do that? Be funny like that, just standing waiting for the Brown Line [train in Chicago]?'' Comedy without malice Despite his sweet-natured demeanor, Hearon is by no means a clean comic. 'I think a lot of clean comics are serial killers,' Hearon says with a laugh. 'There's something very malevolent about someone who — in this time in the world, when things are incredibly turbulent and incredibly bad for a large percentage of people — would go onstage with a microphone and hold hundreds if not thousands of people captive for an hour and be able to just be like, 'Isn't it crazy when you get the wrong milk at the coffee shop?' That is nuts.' Hearon with 'Sweethearts' co-stars Nico Hiraga, left, and Kiernan Shipka at the SCAD Savannah Film Festival in 2024. () But there's a disarming friendliness, a distinct absence of malice, present even in Hearon's edgier material — and Hearon thinks a lot about how to maintain that tone. 'I do think the first and most important thing onstage is to be funny,' Hearon says. 'Then really after that, it's just like, 'Is it true to me? Is it loving?'' Hearon believes the joke about transgender people's chosen names, for example, works because it's an earnest observation made with familiar affection, not disgust or confusion. 'I have a lot of trans people in my life that I adore,' he says. 'I make jokes about trans people, I make jokes about being fat, … I make jokes about all the things [other comedians who've gotten backlash] want to make jokes about. They just don't come from a place of hating those people, and they're not mean-spirited or lazy.' Story continues below advertisement Advertisement 'So I think it's possible to be all of it,' Hearon adds — empathetic and funny, sharp and respectful. Hearon has little patience for those who argue that being a comedian requires a lack of concern for others' feelings: 'I think you just don't give a f--- about anybody.' Hearon, who was an organizer with Black Lives Matter in college and lately has been organizing with the Missouri affordable-housing nonprofit KC Tenants union, also spends a lot of time thinking about how to 'punch up' effectively. 'If I'm going to be hateful onstage,' he says, 'I want to make sure the hate is directed at powerful people with bad ideas.' Certainly, the inclusivity present in both Hearon's work and his attitude have resonated with both his contemporaries and his audiences. When Hearon filmed 'Sweethearts' in 2022, 'it really did feel like he was king of the set,' Booster says. 'He knew everyone's name and story.' And more than once during his interview with The Washington Post, fans passing by pulled over to briefly, politely thank him for his work ('Hell yeah, brother. Thank you. That's so sweet,' Hearon responds) and acquaintances who've met him at other events stopped to say hello, delighted. On that November afternoon in New York, Hearon was a few months shy of his 30th birthday — with no plans for law school in sight.
