Ronny Chieng, host of “The Daily Show,” compared becoming a U.S. citizen to joining an “evil empire” during an appearance on Variety’s “Awards Circuit” podcast on Friday.
Chieng, who was born in Malaysia and moved to the U.S. as a child before returning to Malaysia at age seven, described his eventual return to America in 2015 as “30 years in the making.”
He said he came back to the U.S. to pursue his career in stand-up comedy and that it was a “weird time” to become an American.
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“I turn down offers to tour overseas all the time,” Chieng said. “I’ve got no interest in it, because I came from there. I’ve been trying to come here… so it makes sense for me to get citizenship, because if I do leave the country, I know I can come back in to the stuff that I’ve been building here.”
Chieng told Variety that the type of things that attracted him to America were “Back to the Future” and “Seinfeld” and not “the Iraq War.”
“It’s like you’re joining this evil empire, but that’s not why you joined it. It just so happened, the evil empire had some really nice TV shows, and they do stand-up comedy in The Death Star,” he said.
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Beginning his tenure on the “Daily Show” in 2015, Chieng noted that “this Trump thing” is all he’s known, saying that since he came to America, President Donald Trump’s “shadow has been looming or in charge.”
“He’s [Trump’s] been talking s— for a long time now. We’re used to him talking s—,” he explained. “He’s been throwing chaos in the mix for a long time now. So in that sense, it doesn’t feel like anything new in terms of coverage.”
Chieng also compared covering Trump’s second term on the “Daily Show” to “being in an emergency room,” describing the non-stop coverage of the president as “outlandish.”
“You kind of get numb to it, because it’s always a car wreck every day. It’s something new coming in, and it’s something you have to comment on,” Chieng said. “It seems outlandish, but at the same time, it’s been outlandish for nine years. So is it outlandish? That’s the feeling.”
