There’s a deceptive simplicity to the oversize neon waves that make up the backdrop of The Intruder, Atsuko Okatsuka’s new hour-long HBO special directed by Tig Notaro. Much like Okatsuka herself, who often sports brightly colored outfits when she takes the stage, the pleasing oranges, purples, and pinks of the set design suggest childlike whimsy. When Okatsuka first appears in monochromatic blue, swaying her hips and dropping it low to a hip-hop beat, the tone shifts, and then — just when the dancing starts to get really sexy — she grabs the mic and pivots again. She’s smiling, wincing, and out of breath as she welcomes the audience. The effect is at once disarming and cozy. It’s as if Okatsuka is hosting a party for people who aren’t quite sure they like parties, and, ever the thoughtful host, she’s doing a fabulous job of making everyone feel like hating parties is actually perfectly fine!
The hour centers around the titular trespasser who made a series of unwelcome visits to the home Okatsuka shares with her husband during the pandemic. She weaves jokes about her childhood as an undocumented immigrant and her current-day fears, such as teenagers, into the narrative, slowly revealing that the title, The Intruder, may also refer to the comedian herself. By continually positioning herself as an outsider, Okatsuka sets up a delicate and complicated role for herself: She must maintain the narrative authority of a storyteller while relentlessly reminding us of her own persistent uncertainty.
Ultimately, the stand-up pulls off the balancing act with grace and delivers a surprisingly triumphant narrative — and one of the best comedy specials of the year. She asks questions about home, belonging, and trauma without ever veering into darkness. Instead, framed by neon lights that embody her own buoyant energy, she transmutes her uncertainty into an hour-long dance with self-reclamation that’s as wobbly as it is joyful. The comedian recently spoke about not always feeling hot, her love of dancehall, and discovering her superpowers.
There are some great jokes in your special about the perils of hotness. What’s your relationship to hotness? Do you identify as hot?
I do! I didn’t always — and that’s what’s even hotter about it! Getting to feel hot is so nice.
Dancing makes me feel hot. Especially because the type of dance I really love to watch and try to embody onstage — or even just when I’m at home cooking — is dancehall. Dancehall is just so sexy and so, like, from your inner gut. It’s so powerful, and there’s no words — it’s just your body and you.
I feel like a lot of people became familiar with your comedy through dance because of your #DropChallenge going viral on Instagram. Is that accurate?
The people-finding-me component comes in different waves. One time I did a stand-up set during an earthquake, and that went viral, so a lot of people found me through that.
It was a 7.1-magnitude earthquake. I was performing at the Ice House comedy club in Pasadena in 2019. In the video, you could see what was happening. The camera’s shaking and I’m calming down the audience, making sure they’re okay, and then going straight into jokes. So I just decided to post it, and I got a bunch of followers from that. It’s funny, because you do stand-up for a while and it’s pretty good, but during an earthquake, you know, it’s out of this world, right?
Then I did another video before the pandemic with my grandma, where she was playing the drums while I danced to Shakira, but the drums are like potatoes. So that was another wave. And then there was the #DropChallenge. People find me in different ways. And then they go and do a deep dive, and they go, “Oh my God. She’s been doing stand-up for 13 years.â€
I like that the beats of you gaining a following are emergency, dancing, dancing. That’s a nice capsule of your brand.
I think that has a lot to do with my childhood, too, and how I was raised and how I find myself coping in limited situations. I started trying to make people laugh because I didn’t want people feeling uncomfortable, and that’s how it is with my family. So I thrive in an emergency situation, and the dance … it’s all running from trauma, all of it.
You mention being raised by your grandmother in your special, and you joke that it stunted you, but I’m curious if there are also ways in which it enhanced you. Has it influenced your point of view as a comedian?
My grandma was very protective, so I got to live with my head in the clouds a lot. When there was trauma, she would try to shield it from me. Like lying to me about coming to live in the United States — she thought it would be hard for me to process, so she lied and said it was going to be a two-month vacation. And even my mom — I remember one time she fell on her forehead, and I ran to go help her, but she was trying to shield her face away from me so that I wouldn’t see it. They still tried to provide me space to be a kid and be creative and dream, so because of that, I’m always trying to find the levity in things.
You talk so openly about your mom’s schizophrenia, but you also don’t center it or make it a big deal. Was there a turning point when you felt like you wanted to start talking about that part of your experience?
I was so fearful of talking about it, because I just wanted to be a funny comedian. I was so afraid that talking about certain things was going to take away from that or bum people out.
I think about the audience first when I’m writing. I see stand-up comedy as such a service industry. I don’t think comedians should ever use it as therapy. But when the pandemic hit, and all of us sort of started looking more inward, I started doing that too, and thinking about being really authentic to yourself and true to yourself, and asking Why am I even a comedian in the first place? It’s really a culmination of all of the things — including my mom — that made me a comedian. So why am I not talking about that?
I really started challenging myself to write more about my mom during the pandemic and writing jokes about it, but still, you know, trying to make it comedy first, while respecting mental illness. I want more than anything for it to be normalized instead of this thing we just laugh at or just live in the trauma of, you know? So it was about finding that happy medium.
Can we circle back to hotness? Why didn’t you always feel like you were hot? And then what changed your mind?
Why didn’t I feel like I was hot? I mean, probably for a lot of the reasons a lot of people didn’t feel like they were hot. Whether you’re not fully immersed in your psychosomatic self, or your brain is developing at a different rate than your body, or environmental factors like high school, or people around you saying, “That’s not hot. This is hot.†I was so unsure about myself for a lot of my life. I was trying to be like someone else, sound like someone else — even in comedy. When I first started, I was trying to sound like Tig Notaro, and I was doing a very deadpan way of talking, trying to fit in.
I don’t think it’s just an immigrant thing — I think some people are so sure of themselves. Some people know at 5 years old they want to be a stand-up comedian. But sometimes you don’t have that support or even the ability to have been exposed to something that could have been your career, so it’s just a lot of disconnects. I think that made me feel not hot.
And then those things aligned for me, finally: feeling secure about my physical body after having had an eating disorder when I was in middle school, finding things that made me happy, like stand-up comedy or just the arts in general. Also, seeing other people talk about their insecurities and the times they were unsure helped. Watching Margaret Cho’s stand-up — I saw her talking about her eating disorder and the pressures of being on the first Asian American family sitcom in America. Seeing that she came out not just okay, but the things that made you feel like a freak, those are your superpowers. And seeing that when comedians perform, we might be rounding up our own army of other people who felt that way — that is a superpower of its own. And because of that, I feel hot. And I use lotion now, you know?
Lotion is the answer. Definitely.
Yeah, I could have said “lotion.â€
I feel like there was something else I wanted to ask you about your grandmother …
Oh, does she feel hot?
Yeah, let’s go there. Does your grandma feel hot?
I think she could feel hotter.
She’s starting to feel hot and being able to have fun for the first time in her life, because she was such a caretaker for most of it. People recognize her and people tell her how much she’s changed their lives, and I think that makes her feel hot too.
But then there are times when she’s just so self-deprecating. I have to be like, “Get that out of your head!†She’s like, “Oh, I’m just an old woman. They just see an older woman.†I’m like, “No, I swear. Just you being out and about touches people!†So I’m trying to be that cheerleader for her.