Plainfield Native Talks Stand-Up Comedy, New TV Show

With the announcement of Fox buying his TV show, Plainfield Native Joel Kim Booster took some time out of his schedule to talk with Patch about his show, growing up in Plainfield and the worst experience he’s had doing stand-up.

Patch: How long has “Birthright” been in the works?

Joel Kim Booster: I wrote the script about a year and a half ago. Jax Media, who is one of the production companies and the executive producers, they sort of acquired it back in April. So we’ve sort of been developing from there. I worked with them to do a couple rounds of rewrites and then we got a pilot presentation, which is basically half a script that we use to go up to LA and we pitched a dozen or so networks. After all was said and done, we decided to go with Fox. That happened back in October. So I’ve been working with the studios and networks from there.

Patch: Did you have a few different studios interested in picking it up?

Joel Kim Booster: Yeah, there was some interest there. It definitely came down to a couple of different -- we had some choices at the end and we settled on Fox.

Patch: What made you want to go with Fox?

Joel Kim Booster: Fox really sold us on understanding the vision of the show. Samatta Nara, who is the head of comedy at Fox, who I met in Montreal at a comedy festival earlier in the summer, she’s really brilliant. I think one of the first shows she acquired for Fox was “Last Man on Earth,” which is a show I really like. Fox was the only broadcast network we pitched to. We really envisioned the show as a cable show for a long time. But she sold us on understanding the vision of the show and not wanting to water down anything. We felt really comfortable going there and having it live there.

Patch: According to the description of the show, it’s going to be set in a Midwestern city. Are you planning on making it Plainfield or are you going with a fictional city?

Joel Kim Booster: It’s funny, cause I saw the little blurb that you guys did, and I was looking at the Facebook comments on it and everyone was sort of wondering. I don’t want to spoil too much, but he doesn’t stay in the Midwestern town for too long. I think he’s in it for maybe the first 3 minutes of the show and then he goes on. And it’s set in Ohio. Not Illinois. I didn’t want it to feel quite so beat for beat autobiographical and I love Plainfield a lot. I don’t think I necessarily sought to portray Ohio in a bad light, but I wanted to have more leeway to have fun with that town. And I didn’t want to piss off anybody. I still have a lot of friends in Plainfield. I still love going back home.

Patch: What was it like growing up gay and South Korean in a predominantly white city with possible ties to the KKK?

Joel Kim Booster: (laughs) I was home schooled until I was 16. I didn’t go to Plainfield Central until my junior year. Part of that is because (my parents) are very Evangelical Christian and they wanted to shelter me from some of the things they thought public school might be teaching me. By the time I got to high school, generally speaking, everyone was fairly OK with it. Of course, I dealt with my fair share of racism and homophobia, mostly I would say at that point in my life as a teenager it was homophobia. For the most part, Plainfield is the prototypical Midwestern city in that whatever people feel about you because of your race, your sexuality, they’re pretty good at keeping it behind the curtain. I remember my senior year of high school me and my other friends attempted to start a gay-straight alliance and that was the most “after-school special” experience that I had.

Patch: You mentioned that your parents are Evangelical. What were their reactions when you came out as gay?

Joel Kim Booster: It was a pretty tumultuous moment in my life. I ended up leaving home at that time when I was 17. There were a lot of issues that my family and I were going through at that time and that was sort of the cherry on top of a lot of things. I ended up moving out and spent the beginning of my senior year, I think, couch hopping a lot. I ended up living for the rest of my senior year with the Casey family. Tim Casey was the pastor of the methodist church downtown there and I wasn’t really even friends with his daughter, Sarah Casey. We had one class together. We sat next to each other in choir. Plainfield is a small town and I think kids in our school knew I was doing the couch hopping thing and she very graciously offered to let me stay at her house for one night. I don’t know if she really meant it, but I took her at her word and showed up at her house. Her parents were rightfully a little upset for offering some strange kid a room. I ended up spending the night there and talking to them and the next day they sort of brought me back for dinner and long story short I ended up living there for the rest of my senior year. They were so kind. Sarah has been one of my best friends for 10 years now. It was a really great experience. And now I can say I’m on great terms with my parents. There are some things we don’t talk about with my life, which I guess is a bummer in some ways, but I love my family and I know they love me and the Caseys really facilitated a lot of our reconciliation. I didn’t get back and start talking with my family until college.

Patch: How old were you when first came to Plainfield?

Joel Kim Booster: Three months. I think the insult of choice that I get often from strangers is to “Go back to where I came from,” and it always takes me a minute to remember that I didn’t actually come from here. It always feels like I was born in Plainfield.

Patch: How did you get your start in comedy?

Joel Kim Booster: I guess my real passion when I lived in Plainfield was theater. I was really involved in the theater program at Central and doing a lot of community theater there. And I ended up going to Milliken University downstate in central Illinois to study theater there. After college, I moved to Chicago to sort of pursue theater. That went really well. I did that for a couple of years. I had a couple of plays that were produced there that I was really proud of. I did a lot of work in the theater I was proud of. Once I started getting auditions for television work and commercial work, it was a bit more frustrating with the range of rolls I was getting offered. The last year that I was in Chicago that I was really hustling as an actor, I got called in to be a chinese food delivery boy five different times. It got to this point where it was like, “Oh god, is this the only role I will ever play?”

Patch: Would they ask you to do it with a certain accent?

Joel Kim Booster: Sometimes. Sometimes they would ask for that, sometimes they wouldn’t. It was frustrating for me and I was working on a play in Chicago at the time starring Beth Stelling, who’s quite an established stand-up now out in LA, and she told me, “If you’re frustrated by this, you should do stand-up and you can write and you can perform and you should just try that out and you’re not beholden to anybody else’s idea of what you should be.” So that was really attractive to me and I tried it in Chicago once and the rest is sort of history. I really fell in love with it.

Patch: I’d like you to entertain us with your misery and tell us the worst time you bombed on stage.

Joel Kim Booster: The worst time I bombed on stage was probably recently in Arizona. They did not love me and at one point a woman yelled out that if I had been breast fed I wouldn’t have been gay. And that was probably the worst experience I’ve had on stage.

Patch: How do you deal with that? Does it bounce off you or does it stick with you a bit?

Joel Kim Booster: It just comes with the territory. I’ve been doing this now for five years and really in the grand scheme of things not that long compared to some of my friends in the industry. At this point it’s like any other job where you have your good days and your bad days and you sort of have to roll with it. I know I’m very lucky that this is my job and this is what pays the bills for me now. A lot of people can’t say that. And while it is cool that I get to tell people that I travel a lot to do this, it’s not all roses. It is a lot of, you know, weird towns an hour and a half outside of Portland, Maine that no one’s ever heard of. I’m not traveling to headline in huge major metropolitan cities. It is very much a job.

Patch: With living in New York, will the show be filmed in LA?

Joel Kim Booster: That’s up in the air. I’d love for it to be filmed here, but so much of that stuff has yet to be set.

Patch: When do you start shooting?

Joel Kim Booster: That’s also up in the air. They have to decide right now how they want to proceed with development. If it airs in the summer, we’ll start shooting as soon as February probably. If it’s in the fall, it won’t be until the summer.

Patch: A large part of the show is going to be you looking for your birth parents. Is that something you did in real life?

Joel Kim Booster: No, actually. That’s not something I ever really attempted. Not to say that I’m completely incurious about it, but that’s never been my struggle.

Patch: Have you ever considered coming to Plainfield to do your comedy routine there?

Joel Kim Booster: I haven’t thought about it, but I would be completely open to it. If the show goes through and things are a success, I’ll actually be a big enough draw. I cannot stress enough how much of a nobody I am.

You can see Joel Kim Booster on tour in San Francisco the weekend of Jan. 13 for the San Francisco Sketchfest.

Photo by Alicia Diamond. Courtesy of Joel Kim Booster.