I’m Laughing Because I’m Crying: A Memoir ~ By Youngmi Mayer
As a survival strategy, one Korean American stand-up comedian mixes good jokes with tragic history
(Little, Brown and Company, New York, 2024, ISBN#978-0-3165-6923-1)
Review by Joanne Rhim Lee (Summer 2025)
It’s difficult to describe Youngmi Mayer’s memoir, I’m Laughing Because I’m Crying, as her life experiences are truly unique and there’s really no one to compare her to. Born in South Korea to a white American father and a Korean mother, Mayer spent most of her childhood in Saipan, a tiny island in the Pacific just north of Guam. As her first language was Korean, she often uses Korean expressions and offers up her best translations, but in many ways her thinking is distinctly American.
After completing her last year of high school in Seoul, Mayer moved to the U.S. on her own. She struggled to pay her rent and worked a variety of odd jobs such as restaurant server, sex worker, entrepreneur, freelance writer, and podcast host. In 2018, despite having no experience, she decided she wanted to try her hand at stand-up comedy, and has worked steadily in comedy clubs since.
People may be tempted to write Mayer off as being not very intelligent, as she barely graduated from high school (her words) and never went to college, and the name of her current podcast is Hairy Butthole. However, it is clear from her first chapter that she is not only smart, but a clever writer who is a master of cutting to the heart of the matter and extracting sometimes painful truths in ways that might make readers uncomfortable.
Mayer explains that her Korean family was poor and uneducated. To overcompensate for their shame, they would tell funny jokes, even at solemn occasions such as funerals. Though some disapprove of using humor on serious occasions, Mayer sees it as her family’s superpower, the secret tool helped them survive life’s worst indignities.
In the first half of her book, Mayer focuses mostly on her Korean mother’s side of the family, injecting history lessons about Japanese colonization, the Korean War, and South Korea’s miraculous economic recovery in the 1980s. These history lessons are never dry or boring; they are either so painful that you want to cry, or so hilarious that you can’t help laughing out loud, often at the same time (hence the title of her memoir).
Some of the stories she shares are unbelievably sad and shocking, such as the orphaned girl in her mother’s village who had an intellectual disability and was raped repeatedly throughout her life. The girl eventually became pregnant, but didn’t understand what was happening. When the people in the village realized she was no longer pregnant, and they searched everywhere and found her baby at the bottom of an outhouse. As Mayer’s mother told this story, she laughed so hard that her tears began to flow.
When Mayer was little, her mother used to beat her for being overweight, calling her 탕탕이 (fatty). One day she hit her so hard with the wooden spoon that it broke, saying “You’re so fat you broke my spoon!” They both burst out laughing, again so hard that tears ran down their faces. When this happened, her mother would say, “‘Do you know what happens if you laugh while crying? Hair grows out of your butthole.”
The author describes her family members engaging in obviously inappropriate, sometimes bizarre behavior, and it leads the reader to infer the source is unresolved trauma, perhaps trauma that dates back several generations. But as a memoirist, Mayer is extremely self-aware; she is in on every joke and every raised eyebrow at her comedy shows and behind every joke and funny predicament she describes to her readers.
In addition to her mother’s body-shaming, her father had an eating disorder, leaving Mayer with life-long body image issues. She comments flatly, “There is no cure for the disease that my parents passed down to me. There is a huge chance that this disease will ultimately take my life. But at least I am skinny.”
One of the funniest sections of Mayer’s book is her description of her last year of high school in Korea, after her family moved back from Saipan. Though they were struggling financially, her mother greatly valued education, and somehow Mayer ended up in a posh private school in Seoul. Most of her new classmates belonged families who own huge business conglomerates (jaebol). She prefaces this section by saying she doesn’t want to get in trouble with any of these powerful companies, so she will not refer to them by name. Instead, she not-so-discreetly refers to all of these companies and the families that own them as ShamShung.
After high school, Mayer was in an abusive relationship with a 26-year-old drummer in a band. To escape from the relationship, she booked a flight to San Francisco to visit a friend, with no clear or long-term plan in mind. After a few wild adventures, she meets Danny, an up-and-coming chef at the restaurant where she worked as a server. She eventually dates Danny, gets married and has a child with him.
Mayer was oddly attracted to the fact that Danny is a Korean adoptee. She wanted him to know that his country did not abandon him, but in fact longed for and missed him. Her thoughts on adoptees may be controversial, but as with other topics, she does not hesitate to share them.
For as long as she can remember, Mayer’s parents continued to ride out their unhappy and dysfunctional marriage, claiming that they did so for the sake of their two children. Mayer believes that this approach is ludicrous, as it teaches children that misery is acceptable, and happiness is unobtainable. Unlike her parents, she left her own unhappy marriage to Danny, getting a divorce at the height of their restaurant’s success, even though it left her in a very vulnerable economic situation.
Mayer seems fearless; she isn’t afraid of failure, being alone or poor, or having anyone laugh at her. In fact, she hopes that you will laugh with her, with bonus points if your laughter is mixed with tears. She writes, “My skill is the ability to make anyone laugh while they’re crying. My skill is to make your butthole hairy. Most importantly, my skill is to make sure you’re not ashamed of your hairy butthole. Because I have one too. And I got it by trying to survive.”
