I remember the summer of 2020 with a little hindsight. It was the summer of Covid and the lockdown. And it was George Floyd’s summer—the summer of Black Lives Matter and the racial reckoning that wasn’t.
I remember standing in the square in the hot hot heat, listening to a speech delivered with a bullhorn. The speaker was a young Cambodian American single mother, Tavi Tornado. She had risen from obscurity within the Northern California #BLM movement. It was her turn to speak.
She spoke as a child of the Cambodian genocide. She spoke as a survivor. She spoke of independent Cambodian American donut shops—their attempt at winning the American Dream.
She spoke of how America had failed her. And she punctured the complacent liberal myth of multiculturalism in racially divided Northern California. Her speech was excoriating. It burned like salt. It stung my ears and my heart to listen. But I was grateful to her.
In that movement, Tavi Tornado earned the reputation of a firebrand truth-teller and became something of a prodding conscience to local white politicians. She was also something of a lightning rod. Many wanted her to stop talking.
I marched and watched the protests get smaller and smaller until there were none. The fire had burnt out. Tornado had burnt out, too.
“During the three years of the pandemic, I was in an active court case with my abuser,” Tornado says. Without going into painful detail, it was a personal microcosm of what she was fighting in the streets. She adds, “I was always in fight mode. In friendship and activism. I was there to fight. I found myself getting lost in the activism.”
She’s healed a lot since then, by her own estimation. One expression of it is her turn toward humor.
Tavi Tornado the activist is now a comic and comedy co-producer. And the through line is clearer than it seems.
Humor is the great coping mechanism for dealing with the arbitrary absurdity and dehumanization of the modern condition.
In our telephone interview, she told me a gallows-humor joke, the premise being an attempt to tell her 12-year-old son about his troubled grandmother’s experience of losing her best friend in a land mine explosion:
“Told my kid, ‘Grandma’s best friend blew up in Cambodia.’ And he’s like, ‘Oh my God, I didn’t know Grandma’s best friend was famous.’ ‘Honey, she exploded.’ ‘Mama, can I follow her on TikTok?’ ‘Honey, she’s everywhere.’”
It’s funny. And it’s devastating. And whether or not she intends it as a continuation of her activism, it’s smartly subversive.
With the adult political discourse effectively shut down, comedy is perhaps the only public space where we can come to grips with extremely thorny issues of race and sex and identity.
I could not help but think of her speech in the square, because the content (drawn from her biography) was much the same.
The same tension. But now there is a release.
And instead of dispersing, her audiences are growing. The vehicle is her co-production company, OK Good Comedy. Bigger and bigger nights. The marches, in reverse. Whether it’s gallows humor or parenting jokes, America could use a laugh.
“Things are so serious now,” she says. “Comedy is a means of survival, but it’s also a means of joy and perspective, celebration and community-building.”
Learn more: OK Good Comedy hosts shows almost weekly at The Lost Church and OrganiCann in Santa Rosa, F.I.S.H. in Sausalito, and Kilowatt and Boozeland in San Francisco. Full schedule at @okgoodcomedy on Instagram. There are also rumblings of an OK Good Festival in Guerneville this spring.
