Atsuko Okatsuka’s comedy special, Father, is an unfailingly funny laugh riot

For someone whose brand is “quirky”, it’s hard to imagine Atsuko Okatsuka was ever a Californian high school cheerleader, standing on the sidelines, jumping for someone else.

Sure, there’s the theatricality of her stand-up - the physical comedy, the way she modulates her voice or the expressiveness of her face, that might draw on experiences performing with pom-poms.

But her whole thing, as the queen of silliness with her distinctive bowl cut, the exuberant, food-themed jewellery and pop-coloured wardrobe, doesn’t scream conforming to a high school ideal.

“Probably the stereotype is that (cheerleaders) are popular or whatever, but that was not the case with my cheer squad,” Okatsuka told The Nightly. “We’re not a monolith, just like Asians aren’t a monolith, right?

“Our school, our cheer squad was self-taught and was full of girls that were like, ‘If it weren’t for cheerleading, I would’ve joined a gang’. It was like that. It was mostly low-oncome folks that joined the squad.

“Some of the girls were dating gang members, and then some of them had been shanked before. They don’t show that on TV.”

What were the popular girls doing? “Swimming, or golfing, actually. That’s a rich person’s sport,” she replied.

The cheerleaders were never asked to support the popular girls’ golf team. “We would get kicked off, they’d be like, ‘This is trashy, no dancing, are you kidding?’. Also, doesn’t golf last for hours? I’ve never played but I feel like we would die by the end.”

Like many comedians, Okatsuka exploits pain and trauma for laughs, but her sense of humour is warm and when she shares the story of her history, as dark as it is, she never makes it grim.

Okatsuka was born to a Taiwanese mother and Japanese father. Her mother was, at the time, an undiagnosed schizophrenic, and when she was eight years old, her mother and her grandmother took her from Tokyo on a two-month holiday to Los Angeles.

Except, they never returned, and became undocumented migrants in the US for several years. She also found out later that at the time, her father had full legal custody of her so, technically, she had been kidnapped.

Her childhood years between countries (she also lived in Taiwan) helped her material become internationally relatable.

“I moved around in three different countries, I have family in Japan, Taiwan, the States and, at one point, in Indonesia,” she explained. “So, I’ve had to learn to (adjust) everywhere I’ve moved to. I didn’t always know the language, so that’s why I’m a physical performer.”

Okatsuka hasn’t been on the scene for very long. She first went viral in 2019 when a video of her performing through a 7.1 earthquake made the rounds on YouTube.

Her 2022 comedy special on HBO, The Intruder (which streams in Australia on Binge), made her name globally, and provided the springboard for her Full Grown global tour, including stops in several Australian cities.

This week, she will release her second special, Father, on Disney+, which draws mostly from Full Grown, but with some changes.

The title derives from a line in the special, in which she explained that her fans call her mother, but really, she is father. In the intense, self-described co-dependent relationship between her and husband Ryan Harper Gray, Okatsuka is the one who, for example, is entirely unfamiliar with the controls on their washing machine.

Her stage persona is someone who is adorably scatterbrained, but it’s a heightened version.

“What I put on stage is all the worst qualities of myself, but in real life, I am a little more put together,” she explained. “If I’m just me on stage in real life, I would have no friends, my husband would be gone.

“You cannot be this unorganised and not know things, and just go around life, losing my purse, losing everything, you know what I mean?

“But the things that I talk about are things that actually happen. I’m just putting them in an order back-to-back, so you’re like, ‘This b---h is unhinged’. In real life, there are more days in between where I’m a little more put together.”

It’s that messiness that really resonates with Okatsuka’s fans. She personifies someone who never learnt to be an adult, which is exactly what even the most “put-together” person secretly feels on the inside.

Okatsuka gives the audience permission to have a laugh about our individual and collective cluelessness.

That relatability is what has led to what she called a parasocial relationship with her fans. Because she shares so much of her experiences, the boundaries between performer and audience can blur.

Recently, she was on the Tiana’s Bayou log ride at Disneyland Los Angeles when it broke down, and Okatsuka and her friends were stuck. Where they were, it was outside in broad daylight, and she could hear people cry out, “There she is, it’s Atsuko!”, and filming and taking photos of her.

“Behind us, other logs were being rescued before us, so people were passing by and then they would crouch down to me in my log and take selfies with me,” she recalled.

“People have told me, ‘You really make us feel like we’re friends’.”

She has asked herself what this relationship with her fans mean, but said she’s an open book, and still sometimes replies to people’s DMs.

But there are limits, and she has tried to negotiate how many meet-and-greets she’ll do every night after a show, but a lot of that is also about saving her voice.

“It’s very taxing, and if I don’t conserve energy, then I can’t give anymore. As an artist, you want to give to the people, so it’s just balancing that and figuring it out.

“I want people to feel seen.”

Atsuko Okatsuka: Father is streaming on Disney+ from June 13.