Rex Navarrete's Badly Browned: The first Filipino American stand-up album

"You're gonna piss me out!"
--one of many Rex Navarrete character malapropisms during Badly Browned

While watching a back-to-back KQED evening marathon of Asian Pacific American Heritage Month-themed documentary programming (Arthur Dong's Hollywood Chinese and Jeff Adachi's The Slanted Screen, a doc that both PBS and TCM seem to air a million times), I thought to myself, "These APAHM nights on KQED could really use a doc about Asian American comedians like Adachi's other doc, You Don't Know Jack. Why are minority history months always so damn reverent and serious?"

I wonder when You Don't Know Jack--the doc about comedian and Barney Miller scene-stealer Jack Soo, not the recently greenlit Pacino-as-Jack Kevorkian biopic of the same title--will show up on KQED and add some much-needed humor to their often stuffy APAHM programming.

(Somebody ought to make a doc about present-day Asian American stand-ups, and it better not be in the style of annoying and vapid reality shows about stand-ups like Last Comic Standing or any other show that's not the short-lived Comedians of Comedy, still the only reality show about stand-ups that's worth a damn. The doc ought to be more like Comedian, the smart 2002 doc about Jerry Seinfeld, Orny Adams and the difficulties of the craft of stand-up. The Asian American stand-up scene has enough fascinating stories, interesting ideological disagreements and juicy rivalries to fill an entire edition of Make 'Em Laugh: The Funny Business of America.)

Comedians of color don't get enough praise or props during minority history months, which is why I'm devoting this post to the first Filipino American live stand-up comedy album, a 1998 CD that's a solid knee-slapper for almost all of its 65 minutes. It's even got kickass scratch instrumental interludes provided by DJ Qbert too.

I used to play Rex Navarrete's Badly Browned CD all the time on my university radio station. Navarrete is the first Filipino American stand-up I've seen who's represented us--a certain generation of Empire Strikes Back-watching, Skratch Piklz alumni album-buying Filipinos who grew up on Pryor, Mooney, Cosby and Murphy instead of Dolphy. For a while, I used to be able to recite huge chunks of Badly Browned tracks like the Star Wars bit, the ad-libbed "KBOY with Mr. Bolisario" skit ("Long time ago, when I was a childrens, uh, the, uh, Aquaman, uh, Sunday afternoon, used to cook me chee-ken!"), "Maritess vs. the Superfriends" and "Mrs. Scott's ESL Class," about a rambling Pinay ESL teacher named Mrs. Scott who makes hilariously ditzy statements like "the Philippines is the southernmost island of Spain" (I love hearing the mostly Fil-Am San Francisco State audience boo after that line).

On his site, Navarrete recalled the recording of Badly Browned:

Kormann Roque of Classified Records and I came up with the same idea, why don't we experiment and record a live show of mine and see how it sounds? So we did. My buddy, Elrik Jundis, produced a venue and a show for me at UC Berkeley's International House on November 1st, 1997. A one-night only, two show evening. This was where "Maritess" was taped. The best thing about accomplishing that feat was helping one of my best friends give birth to her son, Lakas, earlier that afternoon. I became an instant godfather. I named one of Q-bert's tracks after him on BADLY BROWNED. I'd say that that day had to be one of the most blessed days of my life and my career.

On April 20th, 1998, the same production team, now with full support from Classified Records, came together to bring to SF State's McKenna Theater the live taping of BADLY BROWNED in a packed, standing room only house of 700 plus fans. This was so awesome, I never thought so many Filipinos would dig Flip comedy this much and this intensely. Nevertheless, we finished that night exhausted and a couple months later came our with that first live comedy CD. It featured scratch tracks from DJ Q-bert from the Invisibl Skratch Piklz which gave it a Def Comedy Jam kind of feel to it. It still remains to be a great seller online and at my gigs, thanks to your support. I think BADLY BROWNED contains some of my most favorite material to that point in my career.

I wish I had more to say about this milestone CD that had me rolling during much of my senior year, other than I'm looking forward to Navarrete's fourth stand-up album, and I could never view Starship Troopers the same way again after Navarrete squashed the movie version with his big tsinelas.

De La Hoya/Pacquiao 24/7: "Filipinos, they're a very clingy people"

Well, my mom and some of my relatives are clingy. Not me. I'm a Pinoy who craves his me time. So I guess that makes me more like Manny Pacquiao's trainer, Freddie Roach, who said the above funny quote about Pac-Man's huge entourage in De La Hoya/Pacquiao 24/7.

The four-episode HBO series about the advent of De La Hoya/Pacquiao Fight Night is my current favorite docu-show. Maybe it's because I'm Filipino, but seeing Filipinos get this much non-Basco brother airtime on American TV is awesome, despite the overabundance of footage of the poorest Filipino areas, as the PinoyLife blog(*) has noted with snarkiness ("Please... film some Pinoys in Manila that are near some offices, universities, and malls"). (During the weight challenge sequence with Pacquiao's entourage, I loved how I could overhear an entourage member saying, "Excited ko!" That's a line I don't hear everyday on HBO. The only Tagalog that's uttered on HBO is during Return of the Jedi, for Christ's sake.)

There's some terrific documentary filmmaking on display in De La Hoya/Pacquiao 24/7 too. The sequence about Pacquiao's Catholic upbringing and his charity work was masterfully shot and edited. The cutaway from Pacquiao's mother to the People's Champ finishing his prayer in the gym was beautifully done. I haven't enjoyed a boxing doc this much since When We Were Kings.

A Slate.com reviewer wrote that De La Hoya/Mayweather 24/7 lacked "what When We Were Kings had in spades: historical importance to match the spectacle... the stakes of the fight are much lower than the promotional bluster would lead you to believe."

But the stakes are incredibly high with this fight, for both the 35-year-old, over-the-hill De La Hoya and his younger, shorter and faster opponent, whom I'm rooting for and whose triumphs in the ring have uplifted "an entire anguished nation," to borrow Geologic's words from his review of the docu-show. If Pac-Man wins this fight, it will uplift us even more. Filipinos everywhere will not show up for work on Monday. If you run a hospital, you can forget about those bedpans being emptied on Monday because your nurses will be out celebrating.

(*) Funniest line from the PinoyLife recap: "Buboy, Buboy, Buboy. You have the wackest name in the history of Filipino athletics. I'm sure that Manny appreciates all you do being his confidant, his friend, and cornerman. To most of the Filipino Americans reading this site, you're kinda like Too Big MC with Manny being MC Hammer."

Aziz Ansari: Better Know a Blogroll Link, Part 4

Aziz Ansari, the co-star, co-creator and co-writer of MTV's hilarious sketchcom Human Giant (the source of this year's NSFW viral favorite, the "Will Arnett sex tape"), is my current favorite Asian American stand-up, primarily because he doesn't opt for material about his Indian heritage or why his immigrant parents talk so funny. Some Asian American comics excel at ethnic humor even though it's their only shtick (Rex Navarrete), while others that I'd rather not name really suck at it.

Ansari once told Gelf magazine why he avoids ethnic humor in his act: "I have some jokes like that, but I hate them. I'm tired of 'em. I just feel like it's too easy, you know what I mean? Some of that stuff is way to [sic] easy to talk about--it's not challenging."

Next season, Ansari will reach an audience outside of the alt-comedy crowd and the blogosphere when he appears in a recurring role during the upcoming final (?) year of Scrubs and as a regular on The Office's yet-to-be-titled spinoff sister show. I guess he listened to his agent's advice about laying off the sex tapes with Will Arnett.