Ken Jeong: Somebody Call A Doctor

He’s an ex-doctor, a former high-IQ club member, and he’s rocketed out of the boot of a car, naked, right into The Hangover. FHM gets bossed by the smartest, scariest man in comedy.

Work at the FHM office has ground to a complete halt. Ken Jeong is filling the air with threats and expletives, and hurling projectiles while stamping his feet into the top of a desk. Then, all of a sudden, he’s tenderly stroking the face of an FHM writer in the creepiest way imaginable, telling him exactly what he’d like to do to him at his hotel room later that evening. He prowls the room like he owns it, clambering over keyboards and chairs, spouting 20 minutes of pure, improvised lunacy about soy milk stocks and paper quality as he assumes the role of FHM’s uncompromising new boss. Like most Ken Jeong performances, it’s 75% hilarious, 25% terrifying, and completely hypnotic. It’s the Ken Jeong we know from the big screen.

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But with the shoot wrapped, Ken clambers off the desk for the interview, and a transformation takes place. He seamlessly down-shifts from a shouty megalomaniac to tranquil and almost shy. He becomes the man behind the $100 million lunatic. Nobody would really expect Jeong to behave like The Hangover’s Mr Chow in real life, pretending to fling hot jizz around and burying his face in mountains of coke, but the contrast between his on- and off-camera personas is so extreme, it’s thrown us.

“People are always kinda shocked at how nerdy, polite and calm I am off-camera,” he says, softly spoken and smiling. “From day one, I’ve always been able to walk straight into a character when the camera’s on – boom – then I’m a different guy when it’s off. It’s for balance. I have to save all the energy up, y’know?”

This surely exhausting ability to rocket from 0 to 60 in just microseconds has propelled Jeong into the Hollywood A-list. For most of us, our first exposure to his unique brand of unhinged hilarity came with that scene in The Hangover, in which a naked Mr Chow exits a car boot in the most explosive manner imaginable.

Four years on, Chow has become such a beloved fan-favourite that Jeong has been promoted to the lead role in The Hangover Part III. It’s a remarkable achievement but, humble to a fault, Ken says he still can’t believe his luck. “I’m getting to do exactly what I wanted to do when I was 18 years old. I honestly never thought it’d happen, and now I’m living the dream.”

Ken took a strange, circular route to comedy mega-stardom. The son of South Korean immigrants who’d settled in South Carolina, the teenage Jeong was a podgy and prodigiously talented student who graduated high school two years early, having captained the High IQ Team and won the city’s Youth of the Year award. Although he’d developed a geeky love of comedy – particularly the stand-up of Eddie Murphy and Richard Pryor – he caved in to pressure to channel his genius-level smarts into medicine.

“I really wanted to be an actor, but I didn’t think it was realistic,” he recalls. “I felt I had a responsibility as the first-born, good Korean son to go to med school and take a sensible, academic route. But I had this overwhelming urge to keep performing, so I started doing stand-up while I was there.”

Ken completed his lengthy medical training and began working full-time as a doctor (technically, he’s still a licensed physician in the state of California). But the lure of laughter proved too strong, and he continued to moonlight as a stand-up, juggling the gruelling hours of his respectful day job with the late-night, dingy LA comedy clubs. He didn’t get a lot of sleep.

“Yeah, it was... exhausting. But it was a massive adrenaline rush. I’d work during the day, then every night I’d go to clubs to see if I could sneak a spot on stage. Sometimes I’d wait for hours, only to get bumped at the last-minute for a more famous stand-up. And I bombed. A lot. It was a good way to develop thicker skin. I definitely paid my dues.

“Stand-up can be pretty brutal. When you’ve got a room full of people and you’re doing well, it feels easy, but you can do the same set the next day with a different crowd that’s not on your side, and... well, you just gotta take that hit. Stomaching a bad show is hard.”

Ken was walking a daily tightrope between a respected, lucrative career in medicine and a one-in-a-million shot at comedy stardom, with nothing but perseverance and big-balled bravery to sustain him. Compounding the pressure was the fact that, in Ken’s opinion, he wasn’t actually that great a stand-up.

“I was decent enough to get an agent, but I was never a great comic,” he shrugs. But through all the knocks, setbacks and heckles, he kept his eye on the prize. “It was always about aiming for the end goal, making the move into acting.”

Then, in the mid-2000s, Ken had his world turned upside down by a fat man in Slough.

“The original BBC version of The Office is my favourite sitcom of all-time – easily,” beams Ken, his gentle voice rising for the first time. It proved a huge influence on him. “I was still a doctor when it came out, and me and my friends watched series one, two and the Christmas special back-to-back so many times, we memorised it. It’s perfection.”

Ken was still lacking a platform for his own talents, but it was time to make a life-changing career decision. It was a decision that would be made much easier after finally striking gold with successful auditions for two soon-to-be-legendary comedy franchises: The Hangover and US sitcom Community. The Hangover hit big screens in June 2009; Community was on the small screen three months later. By Christmas that year, Jeong was a bona fide star, thanks to a pair of roles that allowed him to showcase the kind of scene-stealing lunacy that he’d been perfecting on comedy stages for over a decade.

“The day I was able to act full-time, without a job to fall back on, was the day I considered myself a success. When I could support myself solely with comedy, I felt like, ‘OK, I made it.’”

The Hangover’s Mr Chow and Community’s Spanish teacher Señor Chang may both be swivel-eyed, shoot-yer-mouth nutters, but, the way Ken sees it, they’re two very different characters. “They’re at the opposite ends of the crazy spectrum. Chow’s more bad-ass: he’s an international criminal, he’s got his stuff together, he walks with a certain swagger. But Chang is the complete opposite – he’s kinda pathetic. Everyone hangs on Chow’s every word, but nobody listens to a word Chang says.”

Thanks to Jeong’s next-level performances, Chow and Chang both earned themselves instant online fanbases, devoted to compiling the characters’ loopiest moments through viral YouTube tributes. It’s grinning anti-hero Mr Chow, however, who’s really rocketed Ken’s career skywards, taking him to the level where people quote his lines at him in the street.

“People quote Chow at me all the time,” he laughs. “They probably will do for the rest of my life. I was once at an ATM in LA, and there was a middle-aged white guy in a convertible, staring at me for, like, the longest time. It got kind of weird; I could tell he was going to say something, but I had no idea what. Then the lights turned green, and as he drove off he shouted, ‘Toodle-oo, motherfuckeerrr!’ That made me laugh so hard.”

With Jeong’s fame having hit such dizzy heights, Community fans have fretted that he’ll be leaving the cult show (currently filming its fifth season); that he’s now too big a star for the role of Chang – who, like Mr Chow, started out as a supporting character, but has since drifted towards the show’s centre. “I’ll never leave Community,” states Ken, definitively. “It’s my TV family. Five years working on that show and The Hangover has been my training, my 10,000 hours.” Despite being critically acclaimed, Community has never managed to attain The Big Bang Theory-like levels of popularity – partly because it’s kind of hard to describe it to people who’ve never seen it. Does Ken care to give it a shot?

“Well, it was conceived as a show about life at a community college, centred around a lawyer who’s forced to go back to school because he faked his degree, but it’s since blossomed into a huge universe. It’s the most ambitious sitcom on TV.”

Community and Jeong are perfectly matched: both are fiercely smart, but committed to keepin’ it stoopid. “I don’t know if you need to be smart to play dumb or crazy, but you do have to be thoughtful. Ricky Gervais, The Simpsons, Steve Carell – they all do that perfectly. I’m known for playing villains, but you don’t play them as if they think of themselves as evil. To them, they’re the good guy, just having a bad day.”

All that training and all those years of toiling away at the comedy coalface has paid off. Ken Jeong is one of the planet’s most in-demand comedy faces (and voices, having recently lent his cackle to animated hits Turbo, Bob’s Burgers and Despicable Me 2).

Five years ago, he was a total unknown, albeit a total unknown with an ability to diagnose you with a cold or give you a rectal examination. In 2013, he now counts Jamie Foxx as one of his closest pals, to the point where the pair have an agreement to appear in all movies written or produced by each other.

“He’s a hero of mine,” nods Ken. “He was a role model for me since [early-’90s sketch show] In Living Color; he was one of the main reasons I wanted to get into comedy. And we’ve become good friends. He’s written a movie he wants me to star in – a basketball comedy. We’re always thinking of ways to work with each other.”

Becoming Jamie Foxx’s inseparable bezzie mate: it’s exactly this kind of WTF-has-happened-to-my-life occurrence that’s kept Ken Jeong dazed at his own good fortune over the past few years.

“I met Zach Galifianakis back when we were both doing stand-up; we’d always bump into each other at open-mic nights. We talk all the time about how it’s so amazing that it’s all come full-circle. We were in Brazil doing The Hangover press tour, and there were thousands of fans there. We’d both gone from appearing at this LA coffee house with an open-mic night where you had to pay $3 just to get on stage, to that. And we had this moment where we just looked at each other like, ‘Can you believe this is actually happening?’”

The Hangover Part III and The Hangover Trilogy are out now on Blu-ray and DVD.

Chang’s business school

Tip #01

“When firing someone, make sure they don’t steal from you. Repeat after me: ‘Drop those paperclips. Those are the property of the company, and this company is mine. Get out. I don’t care that you’re my mother, turn out your pockets.’”

Tip #02

“Think outside the box at all times. Like, you have a lot of pretty-lookin' ladies on the cover of FHM, but have you ever thought of having pretty-lookin' foods? Do you really wanna see a lady in a bikini in February? No – you want sexy mashed potatoes.”

Tip #03

“Be strict. Be efficient. Be a taskmaster. The last thing I need is people getting confused when I’m shouting at someone. ‘This is not a comedy routine. You are fired. Get your things. Get out.’”

From the February 2014 issue of FHM India.