“Don’t worry, I’m not here to buy your properties,” He Huang deadpans at the start of her Melbourne International Comedy Festival opening night set. Huang tells a series of jokes carefully calibrated for white Australian audiences: all Asians look the same to her; all the signs in Melbourne’s CBD are in Chinese; she didn’t need to waste her money learning English to move here.

In her full set, T.E.M.U. Joke Factory, Huang tells the jokes again, only to stop and explain she has been telling them for years and they leave her feeling dead inside. As a jobbing comedian in Australia, she says, she has learned to perform as “white Chinese” – and wants to stop.

T.E.M.U. Joke Factory explodes a comic persona that is hurting Huang. It is comparable to Hannah Gadsby’s 2017 Nanette, where the comedian rejected the self-deprecating persona they built their career on.

In her 2025 Comedy Festival show White Man’s Burden, Huang performed in whiteface as a male billionaire philanthropist. In that show she asked the front row to chant “white power”, creating a confronting choice for audience members: be implicated in our own performance of whiteness (which meant something different depending on our racial backgrounds), or refuse the performer-audience contract of comic licence.

In T.E.M.U. Joke Factory, Huang says early on in her career in the United States, she responded to a white comedian’s comment that she was “not Chinese enough” by developing a “Black Chinese” persona. Huang says she misses the freedom this persona (which involved racialised speech and gestures, but no blackface makeup) afforded her: it is a discomfiting response to an industry that told her she could not perform as herself.

Across this year’s Comedy Festival, we saw a variety of shows – like Huang’s – which demonstrated some Australian audiences are ready for uncomfortable comedy and........

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