S8, Ep8: Phil Wang, comedian

0:00This is The Guardian.

0:07A quick warning, there is some strong language in this episode. I'm Grace Dent and this is Comfort Eating from The Guardian. A podcast where we pay homage to the lesser celebrated foods in life. Because even as a restaurant critic, I believe the food that matters most is often that snack you cobbled together when you curled upon the sofa. Each week, I ask my guest to lift the lid on what comfort foods have seen them through their lives because you can tell a lot about a person from what they eat behind closed doors. Hello, friends. You find me in prep for my next guest. I am sprawled on my sunset yellow velvet sofa under my ginger cat shrimp.

1:00Now, it might not look like it, but I am in the middle of a workout. Brain scans apparently show that the same parts of the brain light up when you think about exercising as when you actually do. Apparently, you get the same hormonal response in your body. So right now, I'm actually coming top five in the Hackney Half Marathon. Neural circuitry, It's called It Is Complete Magic. Now, my guest is a man who I think is secretly doing actual exercise. It is super droll comedian Phil Wang, as his snug outfits on Taskmaster have proved while setting Reddit alight with intrigue. Phil Wang is a purveyor of not one, but two Netflix comedy specials.

1:50He has had a textbook comedy career, president of Footlights, the Cambridge University Comedy Club, from where he graduated not only with an engineering degree, which hasn't been of much use, but with awards from Chortle and Comedy Central. From then, he's done his time at the Edinburgh Fringe, in which his 2019 show, Filly Filly Wang Wang, broke records because it sold out before the festival even started. His last tour at the Royal Festival Hall sold out and recently he stepped in as host for Have I Got News For You with One Day's Notice. In essence, Phil Wang can do it all. It's quite sickening really, isn't it?

2:42Phil Wang. Oh, hi, Grace. Welcome to Comfort Eating. Thank you for having me. You've just got out of a taxi. Yeah, it was unfortunately one of those taxi rides where the driver did everything he possibly could to make me feel sick. I have heard that whenever you have an awkward silence, your go-to subject is rating carbohydrates. Oh, yeah. It's my icebreaker. It's my first date question. so you have rice potatoes noodles pasta you can combine them if you want i don't personally and bread noodles is one correct that is also my one is noodles is that when you know that a date's going well if someone goes straight in with noodles what is the ranking that they would give to potatoes that would that you'd go oh god actually my friend's locked out of their house I'm gonna have to go right now if potatoes or bread are one I'm starting to worry potatoes they're the life jackets potatoes and bread right they're not they're not the ship they're there to be under the cheese and tomato but noodles they're the meaning of life I'm gonna ask you to rank something so you've just got out of a taxi I want you to give me your top three taxi snacks you have to be able to get them from one of those small convenience stores i'm going to call them a boss man store that only sells trans fats and lottery tickets paprika crisps are we talking paprika crisps but something ridged or something ideally polish something polish i was going to say it has to be a crisp that you don't understand the writing on the packet and it injures you it injures you i want the nutritional facts to be in cyrillic or i'm not opening that bag that's number one number yeah number one number two a weird kit kat a matcha flavored kit kat that they've bought from a weird cash and carry at least nine years ago you open it and it's green but you don't know if it's meant to be green or it's just off is the earthiness the matcha yes or is it rot you're gonna have to give me the third a fizzy drink it would be a weird cola that's why like coca-cola only sells like it's cherry to like burger king and corner shops i would want a can of rubicon i've been rubicon it's too much it's too sweet yes but it's like the rubicon i can do half a rubicon half a and it's got to be like passion fruit grapefruit and guava

5:26when i roll out the proverbial red carpet for my guests i ask them to bring me their comfort food this is the food that makes them want to do a happy dance now i don't know what's under here should we remove the tea towel okay okay one two three oh wowie look at that Right, Phil Wang, what I want you to do is explain in some detail exactly what it is. So this is a char kway tiao. And it is my favourite Malaysian dish. It is my favourite dish in the world, maybe. It's ho fan, flat noodles, flat rights noodles, cooked at very high heat in a wok. and you've got it in there, prawn, egg, Chinese sausage, very traditionally cockles, bean sprouts and Chinese chives.

6:19And it's... This is so good. You know, let me try this. Yes, yes. Holy heck, I am a good cook. This is the comfort food. Isn't it? It's got a charred, deep flavour. It's got all the soy sauces in it. It's so rich and slick and greasy, but not too greasy. it is cooked in a dirty walk by the side of a road yeah you want you want a thin layer of carbon monoxide on the top of this thing that's come off of car exhaust and the heat is coming from a huge flame and it's just connected by pipe to a shell canister the hygiene rating is c behind him the best food in the world and it's being cooked by a guy wearing a knockoff manchester united top and shorts.

7:08This to me feels like a complex dish that you need to have a think on the way home and get ingredients. It's not the easiest thing to throw together and in the UK it's not the easiest thing to find. Malaysian restaurants have only become a thing in the last five years maybe. The revolution the UK has gone through with Asian food is remarkable in the last 15 years or so. Indian ruled the ruse for so long and Chinese I guess rule the roosts and then in the teens we get the Southeast Asians come in Thai became huge and then Vietnamese became big yeah and then Korean and then which is in Southeast Asia but part of the same phenomenon I would say and then Malaysia sort of started to come through sometimes I feel like people wait a lifetime for their cuisine to have a moment and then when it happens they're just not into it no not at all I'm thrilled and that's right for Malaysia Malaysians are extremely gatekeepy about their food to the point you go to Malaysia you'll tell Malaysian oh I went to this restaurant they go ah why did you go there that's not good you go here go to my and it's nonsense it's as good same it's the same Malaysian loves nothing more than to go to a Malaysian restaurant in London and go okay I won't do that I refuse to do that I won't be part of the problem I'm thrilled that there's it'll get better it's not totally there yet yeah I was reading you know back in the day when the first Chinese immigrants came to the UK and opened up restaurants they couldn't get a hold of soya sauce and they would use watered down marmite we have to start somewhere and i mean isn't that incredible i shouldn't laugh but i don't know there's something also just lovely about it it is the resilience of it yes the resilience yeah i mean you know i will go and get some malaysian food and in the uk and i'll go yeah all right it's just missing this one little thing it's one little thing here i think hygiene standards are probably too high you are brilliant in your latest stand-up on netflix about i can't put too fine a point on it white people and us getting food poisoning everywhere we go it's so bloody brilliant you're talking about when you go off to do a travelogue yeah and you all get out of the minibus yeah and you go and have that delicious food which is from the side of the road yeah and And immediately somebody called, you know, Nigel just shits his pants.

9:30It was James who hasn't since messaged me saying, you awful man. I thought that was incompetence. But he was out of action for like two days. They're all white guys were in Egypt traveling around. And the producer, you know, everyone was getting food poisoning. The producer said to me, your time's coming. Your time's coming. We still have two weeks here. You laugh now, but you're going to be on the toilet for a whole day too eventually. And I shook his hand and I said, I looked him in the eye. I said, I will not get any. I will not for a second do it. It won't happen. And it didn't happen. Everyone got food poisoning of some sort except me.

10:03My defences were built up growing up in Malaysia. I grew up, literally, we would eat dinner and you'd see a rat just run across the drain. And you just keep eating. Oh, look at you trying to eat away from the microphone. You adorable thing. Nobody else cares about that. People have misophonia. They can't stand the sound of it. I suppose by this point they've all tuned out. Every week, people with misophonia complain about the podcast. It's a food podcast. It's not for you, Beryl.

10:40So two Netflix specials, a sellout show at the Royal Festival Hall. This isn't pub open mic night. This is thousands in the audience. Huge stage, cameras filming you at every angle. mic packs attached to your back pocket recording every stomach gurgle after 10 years as a comedian what's your pre-gig food strategy now before pretty much any show i have to be extremely careful about what i eat and i need to eat enough that i'm not like distractingly hungry but i cannot be full i learned this the hard way years ago when i just started getting some tv gigs i I asked on to, would I like to you? You know, when you go to these recordings, you're in your green room, and a runner will come and say, we're getting everyone's food orders.

11:26Here are menus from every restaurant within a two-mile radius. Is there anything you want? And it's free, and there's no limit. Order what you like. And I'm starting out in comedy. Any freebie to me is like, make the most out of this. You possibly can. And I'm like, oh, really? And I grab the Wagamama's menu. I get miso soup. I get gyoza. I get the wakame salad I get a full bowl of fried rice And they're like, you sure? I was like, yeah, bring it to me And they brought it to me And I just wolf the whole thing down Free Free fried rice kills They're like, Phil, I need you to make I'm like, get out I get on set And I don't say a word for three hours I'm so full Were you on with, right So you've got David Mitchell David Mitchell He's incredibly eloquent.

12:18Very. So quick. So quick. Who else is on? Lee Mack. Who is like, he has the speed of an Olympic sprinter. And Rob Brydon. And the three of them make this trifecta where they understand each other so well. They don't need anyone else there. I will now, honestly, I'll ask for a salad. I'll ask for a salad and I'll nibble at that. And on tour, my wonderful tour manager, he became expert at timing the delivery order so that it arrived literally the second I got off stage. So he timed it like 45 minutes or whatever. He knew how long the show was going to be. And 45 minutes before the end of the show, he'd blink, he'd press on the order.

12:52And I'd come off and Paul would say, well done, your noodles are in the dressing room. And people say that famous people are treated like babies.

13:04You have a side hustle. Restaurant awards. Oh, the Slurpees? I am guessing that these are a way of passing the time when well you're always on the road well I did these for I think maybe only about three years and now I do it very casually on Instagram stories but not like I did back in the day I started in Edinburgh Fringe and I went to a noodles place called Noodles and Dumplings Phil Wang Phil Wang am I taking too long we have been tweeting each other sporadically since we were on You've Been Fired on BBC2 I think it was about 2012 no, we've been chatting about food on and off since then who recommended Noodles and Dummies?

13:52It wasn't you, was it? I sent you a message Did you? No, you didn't I'll wait I don't remember my knee Oh, here we go, here we go, I got it Well, well, well Well, I've messaged you on August 13, 2019. Okay. Saying to you, did you ever get to noodles and dumplings? My goodness. Oh my God. The revisionist history on this podcast. You gaslit me into thinking you came up with noodles and dumplings. I was pretty sure that I came up with it and I told you about it. Hey, this is your reply. Hey, no, I'm coming back next week. I'll go then. Full one. Thank you. get his taxi i was a hundred percent sure that i came up with noodles and dumplings and that i went and i recommended it to you oh my god noodle dumplings won the first year i did okay and then i did it for a couple more years and in the last edinburgh before covid which is 19 i went to my cow kitchen and i'd never had any food like it and and i thought they were fantastic and i said this year's i tweeted this year's winners macau kitchen in macau kitchen they'd framed my suite and they said proud winners of the 2019 phil wang restaurant award when i go i'm like a long lost son do you want to know what they said about you oh no is that they said we didn't know who phil wang was after the review given by phil wang many of his fans came to our restaurant wow and they are still coming to us and i would like to say thank you very much to Phil Wang.

15:33Wow, gosh, that's lovely. That's so nice. Now, for a part-time restaurant reviewer, you're in great shape, frankly. Indeed, in 2018, you made a very bold decision to wear a jumpsuit. Now, it wasn't any jumpsuit. It was a yellow Bruce Lee jumpsuit on Taskmaster. There was not much room to hide. A corner of Reddit did go a touch crazy for you. No good sentence starts with a corner of Reddit. Maybe this is just me, but I am sensing regret about putting on the very, very snug catsuit. I don't regret it because it turned out all right, but it was not what I was going for. I can say that for certain.

16:13And the first day I became aware of how snug it was in the southern region was the first day of group tasks where James Acast and Rod Gilbert turned up, gave me one look and said, what the fuck are you wearing? and when you watch those group tests it's the first time in the whole show that you can see me trying to cover myself up i was like eve having eaten the apple i just i'd become aware of shame suddenly and it was too late by that point to change you needed to speak to a drag queen and work out how to tuck.

16:53You grew up with your mum, dad and two sisters. Set the scene for me. What was childhood in Sabah like? White spaces, hot, wet. And we live, I grew up in a town called Kotikinabalu, which is a capital city of Sabah, which on the north of Borneo, the island of Borneo. Life was very pleasant and quite boring, which I think creates a lot of comedians. I think to be a comedian, you have to be a bit of an escapist. In your newest Netflix show, you said something that will always stay with me, which is that people think that everyone around the world wants similar things, but when you live in Borneo, you just want fewer crocodiles in the supermarket.

17:38And that's literally a problem going on right now. Someone got attacked by otters in my hometown. My mom's like, you might want to be careful when you come here next time because the otters are attacking people. And they're part of the city people can't go now because it's the crocodile no-go zones. And people here are like, everyone just wants to be understood and everyone wants to feel like they have an identity. Crocodiles. We're still working on crocodiles. We haven't defeated dinosaurs yet. I've laughed about that line since I watched you. Really? Oh, wow. It just really makes me laugh so much.

18:13Thank you so much. You weren't always an eater. No, I hated it. I loved playing so much. And for me, food and going to the toilet, so both sides of the process, I was like, I don't want to. I want to play. I'm outside playing. The crocodile problem hadn't got to do bad, Ben. So I was still safe. I was like, I want to play. I want to play. I want to play. And then something happened in my biology. I was just like, you need to eat. You need to become big. I just got so fat. I got so big. like 10 11 12 i just got enormous and and it wasn't much exercise for me to do because you know the transport system wasn't great so you had to be driven everywhere so you're not walking you're not cycling is there like a restaurant scene it's very casual so it's the main the main ethnic groups are the chinese the indians and the malays and so those are the main cuisines there we need out a lot because it's quite cheap yeah so one interesting thing is when when the fast food chains came to malaysia they because they all have to be kind of standard price across the world they were more expensive than the rest of the restaurants and so the like kfc pizza hut are fancy i grew up with them as a fancy restaurants okay and people will dress up to go to kfc they'll put on a button shirt and look smart so they think the colonel's going to be yeah yeah they think that's the dress code that's they think the logo is the dress code oh my gosh i guess i better find a little bolo tie somewhere i think that people probably see you on stage and they see you on things and they hear about malaysia and they think that they've got to complete the full picture of you and then it turns out your mom's from stoke-on-trent yeah that's what i was born i was born in stoke-on-trent yeah and your mom from stoke is out there in malaysia does she try to recreate british food for you my most my pretty much all my childhood my parents were just so busy they worked so hard my mother's a doctor and she was just always working my father's an engineer mom would try and make something from from the uk the main centerpiece of this was christmas where she or so there's so many festivals chinese festivals we'd always go to different aunt and uncle's house yeah and we'd be big buffet potluck everyone would bring a little something fabulous food and then christmas came around which is the white one that's the white holiday and so mom was the only white person and in this huge family, it was her responsibility.

20:30And so we'd have Christmas at our house and my mum would have to make traditional Christmas dinner for like 20, 30 people. And she'd spend weeks going around town. We don't have big supermarkets like a Tesco or a Morrison's or whatever where you can just go and get pretty much everything you need in one go. She had to spend weeks going around finding pretty obscure things for Malaysia, so turkeys, ingredients for the root vegetables which are not really that big a thing, the gravy, the brussel sprouts you'd have to find and because we're part french and she grew up with it we'd have escargot for the turkey so then she'd go around looking for tinned snails and snail shells and she'd make this huge feed and trifles she made trifle and my malaysian family the first time they saw this trifle what the hell is that and they tried a bit and they became obsessed so every year she had to make so many trifles phil i have so many questions about this can you get a parsnip in Malaysia.

21:26I'm trying to think. I think maybe not. I don't think we had parsnip. Can you get chocolate orange? No, you'd have to make it yourself. Did you have Christmas crackers? Yes. There's one fancy supermarket in town that was a vestige of the colonial times and you could get things like Christmas crackers there. So you should have to go there. So at the end of this Christmas mail, was everybody worn over to the whole idea of like, basically a Northwest England Christmas. I love this. your mother is a hero. People were one of them especially by the trifle. They were obsessed with the trifle and the snails because we're Chinese we love weird little grubby things.

22:01So the snail the escargot fit in perfectly. A couple of the relatives would have to bring their own food. They'd try a little bit of turkey a little a little pig in a blanket and then they'd eat their rice that they brought but they were in the minority. They were like the older generation. The younger kids my generation loved loved mum's cooking. Do you put Slade on and things like that? No. I only heard Slade when I came to the UK. I have a fact about you that I was told that I think that just says so much. Your first ever job, Phil, was at primary school, where you were given the responsibility of being the cashier in the canteen.

22:35Yeah. So there's a noodle soup stall in the canteen, and it was run by this big, lovely lady who got kids to work for her for 10 cents. But it was so fun, and I felt so important and so grown up, and I was just taking and giving the change. And I was chosen. What it says about me is that I was a good boy. Apparently, you were once given the role of prime minister. Yeah. So our home, I guess you call it, is it home class teacher? The form teacher? Yeah. Mr. Kingsley. Sadly not with us anymore. He thought he would teach us about the inner workings of national governments by assigning everyone in the room a governmental position.

23:17and I, as the good boy, the good smart boy, I got prime minister. So I was prime minister of my class. That was my first ever job was prime minister. Why were you never naughty? I was a good boy. I also grew up in a country that wasn't as lenient as the UK. If you got arrested by the police in Malaysia, that's pretty bad news. You don't just spend a couple of hours in a selling prod home and it's a fun story. It's pretty bad. We still have the death penalty. there's just no kudos for it. For that reason I was well behaved. I was brought up a little bit Catholic, enough Catholic to have internal guilt, and then I went to Chinese school between the ages of 8, well up to the age of 10, where they still performed capital punishment, as in like physical punishment.

24:07So I'd get caned. You get caned for speaking class, for missing homework, for doing badly on a test. I remember one teacher would give you a cane for every percent point you got under 80 on a test so if you got 70 you have 10 strikes and you have to go up on to her and she'd open up your palm and she just you don't need therapy do you because you can literally you can literally say the three-point heady blend of why you are a good Goodbye. Malaysia, the death penalty. Chinese school and Catholic. Yeah. Yeah, that's pretty much it.

24:57You moved to Bath when you're 16. Do you think Waitrose would be improved with crocodiles? I think people would get through their shop a bit quicker. There's a crocodile snapping out their heels. I don't want to say anything as naff as culture shock, but what's it feel like? The weather was a big part of it. Everything feels closer. Everything's smaller. Houses are smaller. Streets are smaller. Cars are smaller. And the world is smaller because of the clouds. The culture shock was, I guess, mostly around food and how different Chinese food was here. And like curry sauce and things like that I had to get used to.

25:34Hang on a minute. Are you saying that British curry sauce that we get in brown baby poo? Are you saying that's not authentic? The scales are falling from my eyes. It's funny, isn't it? What did you think when you first saw that curry sauce? I was fascinated. I thought it was fun. Fun, great. Interesting. Never had anything like this before. I didn't know you could do this to curry. What captains of industry the British truly are. That's what I thought. I thought this is a country where things get made. He said in your David Letterman special, Bath is a town for people who find Idaho too ethnic.

26:14Yeah, I tried to change it from Cheltenham so the Americans would understand what I was talking about. I just come from an international school in Brunei, which is also in Borneo, where I did my GCSEs with people from Australia, New Zealand, Nigeria, Nepal, India, Malaysia, Hong Kong. And then moving from there to Bath, which is white even for England. I was like, oh, yeah, this is white. It was just the homogeneity, the racial homogeneity of it all. there were a few chinese students but they were very much separated into their own group but to the extent that when i started sixth form at the school i was put in a study with two other chinese guys oh for no other reason than my surname and their surname so just like well he'll get on with them and they just put me in the study with them how did you feel when that happened literally pigeonholed i guess because yeah i just felt like people before i'd even started the school's going okay well you're you're one of them and this is how interested we are in getting people to integrate and mix up it was just a shame it just felt like a shame and the school would say well we find that chinese students do stick together and it becomes a chicken egg situation of you know well who's going to make the the effort here you've come from this place where uh you didn't step out of line when you were at school in your last school you're uh you're essentially prime minister yeah humble prime minister and then you get to school in bath is this where you start to be a bit more not naughty but are you a funny person in class no no i was never the class clown but i'd also recently really gotten to stand up because youtube was just taking off and people suddenly put stand up on youtube and a guy called russell peters had had his stand up put on youtube and Russell Peters is an Indian Canadian act and became huge after these clips going on YouTube because he talks about all different cultures in that and things like that.

28:20It's like, wow, you can do stand-up about different cultures, different ethnicities and stuff and it's also a way of addressing your own ethnicity if you are a minority and where you are. I mean, you're saying you're not the class clown. It's quite bold to go, there's Russell Peters. Why don't I just do my own set and put it on YouTube? Why don't I start being a comedian? and it's like you're obviously there's a confidence there there's a there's an inner grit yeah well i wanted to be for perform i did perform as a singer i sang a lot with like school orchestra school bands and that sort of thing i love singing i loved it that's what i wanted to do what's your go-to song like if like we're at karaoke what are you gonna do unchained melody and i did i took lessons with a a big barrel chested filipino man in in sabah who taught me scales by giving me a cassette tape which are recordings of him going and i'd have to take this cassette tape of him going and i play it at home and i have to go next to him and the the song we were aiming towards was unchained melody which he said was the hardest song this is the heart unchained melody is the hardest song if you can do unchained melody you're a great singer doing stand-up doing comedy makes it very hard to do anything earnestly and there's nothing more earnest than singing.

29:40So now I find it quite embarrassing to sing. I think, yeah, that's the price I've paid. You can sing now if you want. Not a chance. I like to think this is a safe space for anyone to do anything or more. If you'd like to sing the whole of Unchained Melody just maintaining eye contact all the way through. No, no way.

30:13in 2008 you arrived in cambridge to study engineering yeah were you under pressure to follow in your dad's footsteps because he he was an engineer yeah my parents were keen they went to university and i was keen i went to university and i loved maths and physics i was good at it and engineering seemed like a good conflation of those two what would they have said if you'd said i want to do drama and english i think they would have said you should do an engineering degree you can do the other stuff anytime after it just get this degree done and then you can do what you want this is my guess what they would have said and you stayed with engineering all the way through four years masters it was hard man you joined footlights footlights yeah you're following in the likes of hugh lorry emma thompson stephen fry olivia Coleman but more than this and this is not really any surprise actually you were Footlights president yeah were you kind of a big fish in a small pond not at all it's opposite experience when you when we started at Cambridge we had an assembly where we had to be told about imposter syndrome and we were all told you don't you probably don't feel like you deserve to be here and we all felt that way because we're all the kids who were the best at our school thinking we were brilliant and then we turned up at university with everyone who's the best at their school and we're in the middle near the bottom and people have breakdowns i had a breakdown at the end of my first term i nearly quit completely what about i was doing a lot of extracurricular stuff because i thought i was expected to i was doing in my first term i did engineering which is already incredibly very demanding degree choir at king's college rowing football comedy at the end of the first time i was like i said to a friend i don't know how i'm going to do this and he said just quit some of that and i was astonished i was like quit i'll always his name was rob and i'll always be in his debt because he said you can just quit something and then after i did that i i was all right i focused on comedy and engineering and and that got me through to the end so you go home and say i'm not going back i went home and i was just crying all the time i was i don't know how i'm going to do this i'm terrible i can't do it i'm stupid i can't do it you were clever at sixth form when you got to Cambridge did you still feel clever no I felt like yeah I felt like I was very lucky to be there I got there by luck and I just sort of I sort of got the exam questions right by chance and and I was going to like struggle for my entire time there so yeah but but it turned out that was a very common experience so would you not say that you had b-knock status oh big name on campus you know what's really annoying varsity the university newspaper did a b-knock list every year yeah and i and i kept telling myself one of these days i'm gonna be on there and then i got full life's president and i was like this is it i'm gonna be on the varsity b-knock list and that year varsity goes we've reflected on the culture behind the b-knock list and we found that it's too exclusive and damaging to the and i thought you're fucking kidding right and so i never got on it so between your degree and being the president of footlights is there any space for fun like are you kind of going out and getting drunk and going to kebab shops big time we'd get i'd hang out hang out mainly in the theater bar the student theater bar and get really really drunk to the point like one one one night it's a student run bar so it's just another student I know running the bar said I think you've had enough that's a student like an employee that wasn't a member of stuff it's another student working around the bar saying I think you've had enough when another student's trying to put you in the recovery position when you know things have gone wrong where was there to eat when you came out of bars and clubs was there a specific place you went to you go to market square which is a square in the middle of cambridge and there were two food vans there on opposite ends of the square sort of competing with each other and one was called the van of life and so the other van had its own name but didn't matter everyone called that the van of death and so funnily enough the van of life was very popular yeah and people never even tried the van of death because they all called it the van of death we use that person that when you went up to the counter and when you were really drunk just thinks that you're a comedy legend i was again usually very well behaved and just so grateful that someone was going to give me cheesy chips but one night i went with my friend danish who did comedy with me and we'd get drunk together all the time and he was so drunk we went to the van of life and we put in our order and danish is just sort of tottering back and forth and then he looks up on the counter and he sees the big tub of garlic mayonnaise garlic sauce and i still remember this day he when the guy's not looking he reaches his hand over and dips his entire fist into the tub of garlic sauce dirty dirty and pulls it out and starts licking it like winnie the pooh does he think it is like a life force does he think it's like it's going to give him eternal life he starts licking garlic sauce off his face like a pig and shit he's so happy and then the this guy the guy who runs a van of life it's like a big scary polish guy turns around and sees him and just starts screaming funnily enough because he has now he's got to dump hopefully he's got to dump all that sauce as if he did people were literally eating food with your friends like yeah you know friends you know elastoplasts floating in it when you were at university uh were you a big romantic name on campus i had a couple of girlfriends i i made the mistake of holding of staying with my school girlfriend for the first year she'll love that description uh well she broke up with me in and so I think she's probably sort of a mistake as well.

36:35Yeah, that stage of life where everything seems so important and everything seems like the one. It's like, well, when am I going to have a girlfriend again? Every decision you make feels like it's going to last an eternity and then you realise that later on that wasn't the case. Did you take women out for dinner at uni? Yes. You were women with food? Yes. Yes. Yes, I would say so. especially with my cooking if I'm by the move I make I make something nice I make something nice do you speak Italian like that just to round out the experience I don't know anything about your love life you're never in the Daily Mail sidebar of shame with anybody I'm trying when I started doing comedy I was very open about that and I was a bit too open about some things and some people and I regretted it and also part of it for me was wanting to undo a stereotype of an East Asian man as being sort of loveless or sexually feckless and I wanted to be this sexually confident East Asian man in the public eye which I think had its merits but in the end I realized some things are maybe better off more private and so I went that way

38:00since then your career has flown it just feels so easy it's almost like you turned up at the job center and said um i'm here to be a comedian and i can begin immediately you know what part of the picture am i missing i certainly had a pretty smooth ride of it and i'm i'm going yeah i will always be honest about that and i got signed like at the start of my third year and it's like two years of uni to do so i already had an agent halfway through my time at university your stage persona is very it's very dry slightly monotone sometimes kind of setting up these punch lines it can be flat and that is your humor and then but in real life do you feel actually i actually do get very excited i do jump and shriek for joy when is the last time that you did jump for joy and you should i want i want i want when was the last time you shrieked with joy oh it it's food it's sitting down it's opening like a really good bottle of wine that i'm excited about yeah with friends who like wine and food and i have that first bite and that first sip and sometimes it's so good I have to I have to dance so you're happy I do a wiggling dance in my chair you went on to do sellout tours you've written a book you've had a series on radio four okay I bet you can answer this so where do you see yourself in 15 years time I would if I asked any other comedian this they wouldn't know I know that you're gonna know where do you see yourself in 15 years time i see myself making something i'm gonna give you some options a write a movie yeah yeah sure start when do they need the script start your own small army of fighters world domination here we go now we're talking yes the the wang dynasty begins here what have you got up your sleeve that you're not telling anybody i'm trying to work up a little script a little tv show but i'm who isn't but i'm trying to i'm writing you stand up but for the most part i'm trying to keep squirrels out of my garden they're always coming in there and they dig holes and they put nuts in it like they're in a cartoon i'll run out and i'll shake my fist at them like a farmer from a nursery rhyme get out that's all i do now is chase squirrels out of my garden we're coming to the end of the interview and i'm going to ask you the most important question of the whole podcast yeah in your recent netflix special wang in their baby and i'm going to say you make a case to white british people for reheating rice yeah i said british people white british people will not reheat rice and this is phenomenon i only became aware of after moving here we reuse rice all the time the fried rice is literally reheated rice that's what fried rice surely not because it will kill you immediately do you not realize that rice grows spores apparently who's not growing spores i'll say what's a couple of spores between friends i have recently got a rice cooker your first ever congratulations rice cooker and the cheaper one the better i think i think that the the crapper the rice cooker the the more liberating it is I think you're right.

41:35I foolishly recently bought a very fancy one, like an induction one. And it makes beautiful rice. But I do kind of miss just a crappy old rice cooker. One that doesn't even have an on button. You have to turn it off at the back. You heat the rice up and then you can just kind of leave it. It clicks on to keep warm. And it just sits and kind of festers, like slightly kind of in a dangerous state, really. This is why you guys are so terrified of your own shadows. Using words like fester. Growing spores. Until it grows spores. Do you feel like you started some kind of campaign? I'm worried that the deaths are going to start.

42:21Yeah, what are you going to do about that? Then I'll be in the Daily Mail thing of shame. What face are you going to pull when you're walking into court? Like that. Sorry. Like that. Just a little. Shamed. Shamed comedian, Phil Wang. I've got a folder over my face covering it like that. And like hands just covering my face as I get into a car. People are pelting me with rice. I'm like. Phil Wang, this has been an absolute bloody delight. Thank you for comfort eating with me. Thank you. I feel so comforted.

42:59Thank you for listening to Comfort Eating. This episode was produced by Hattie Moyer and the mixing and sound design is by Solomon King. The music was written by Axel Kakutie and our executive producer is Lucy Greenwell. If you love comfort eating, go and leave us a review and you can follow or subscribe so you never miss an episode.

43:26Hey, it's Michael Safi here, a presenter on Today in Focus. Today in Focus takes you to the heart of the story with our reporters all over the world. The Guardian doesn't have a billionaire owner. It's independent of corporate interests or political influence. It's funded by readers and listeners like you. Not everyone can afford to pay for the news right now, But if you can, please choose to support The Guardian. You can do that by following the link in the description of this episode. This is The Guardian.