Serious About Comedy: Andrew Phung 認真演喜劇
ENGLISH 英 : Shinan Govani | CHINESE 中 : Kate tong
VENUE: Next Door Restaurant, Unionville · ART DIRECTION: DEBORAH LAU-YU · Creative Direction & Photography: Lucia Graca Remedios · VIdeographer: Karl Man · FASHION DIRECTION & STYLING: ASHLEY GALANG · MAKEUP & HAIR: Satine Yang · SHOES: Andrew Phung’s Collection · Office Team: Lillian Mak, Rhonda Lam, Ruizhou Li
“I am still here! I am just preparing dinner!”
The spectral voice of Andrew Phung rings out to me when, while chatting recently via a video-conferencing call, he suddenly disappears from view to start chopping vegetables.
“Going to do a stir-fry later with chicken!” says the fella who is one of the most pervasive comic celebrities in Canada. We are 40 minutes into a conversation about his life and his work — how he rose to prominence with his role on the hit Canadian sitcom Kim’s Convenience, and his new venture as master of his own CBC show, Run the Burbs — but his focus is now all on his dinner? He is a jokester after all. But as he explains to me, he’s also a married father with a family to feed and keep to a tight schedule. “On Tuesdays, we have jiu-jitsu, and then we’ve got basketball and a soccer game with my son. If I have an hour, I am always doing five things.”
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「我煮緊晚飯呀！」跟加拿大喜劇界名人Andrew Phung訪問期間，他一邊切菜一邊分享家庭、生活及工作等大小事情，一舉手一投足充滿戲劇性。作為成功喜劇演員， Andrew從不怕失敗中磨練出幽默與鬥志。
這位憑藉《金家便利店》(Kim's Convenience)飾演Kimchee一角而嶄露鋒芒的笑匠，現在於CBC電視台擁有自己的處境喜劇《Run the Burbs》。訪問中途，Andrew突然跟我說：「今晚會煮雞」，因為他正在為家人預備晚餐。除了煮飯、Andrew平日也會陪孩子打籃球，踼足球，練習柔術，是個愛家的男人。
Sounds like a man who runs his own sitcom, I say. All those many moving pieces. And cooking. Isn’t that a form of improvisation, his specialty when it comes to performing comedy? A dab here, a zig there? Making do with whatever ingredients you have on hand?
“Improv fundamentally questions how I am wired as a person,” the 38-year-old says.
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He got into it as a response to his upbringing as the son of Chinese and Vietnamese immigrants. “So much of your life — especially when you come from an immigrant background — is about perfectionism, and trying to do your best to succeed. That pressure. But improv is different. Improv is like: “Go ahead and fail!”
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Or to put it another way:
“In life, if there is a cave with a bear in it, you have to go the other way. But in improv, it was like, no; go towards that cave and that bear; let’s see what will happen.”
Andrew 從不浪費時間，他說:「如果有一個小時，我多數會去做五件事。」正因為這種閒不住性格，他的人生就像一套精彩的處境劇。閒時喜愛下廚，工作上則熱愛「爆肚」式的即興演出(Improv)。 兩者好像完全扯不上關係，細想下卻有不少共通點：善用手頭上有限的食材煮出美食；即興演出則同樣需要靈活應變，把隨手拈來的情、境、人或物即時變成演出的素材。
Andrew的童年在卡加利的東北部渡過， 外界一般認為卡加利是白人主導的城市，但他所經歷的卻很不同。「你會看到來自亞洲、南亞移民、又有荷蘭印尼的混血兒；到了九十年代，更有索馬利和蘇丹移民；在此之前，多是來自愛爾蘭和其他歐洲地區的移民。」Andrew 父母也是多元文化的愛情結合：母親是越南人，父親是在越南長大的華人；兩個越南成長的人卻在加拿大玩撲克時遇上！
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Phung caught the improv bug back in high school, when an influential teacher in Grade 12 hired an instructor to come in from the Loose Moose Theatre Company to talk to the class. The assignment was to create sketches on the spot with one or more scene partners. Phung found he was good at it. It became his “thing.” And he’s never stopped. Even today, when prepping for a scene, he goes right back to what he learned when he was in his teens.
He grew up in the northeast of Calgary, a city that Phung says is “perceived as very white.” But that wasn’t his experience. The quadrant he called home has long been a bastion of diversity, reflecting the Canadian immigration patterns of the last 40 years. “You see there the early waves of Asian and South Asian immigrants, followed by Dutch Indonesian, and in the ’90s, Somali and Sudanese immigrants. Before them were Irish and other European immigrants.” So it’s a mix of people and cultures. Phung’s family fit right in.
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父母都是努力奮鬥的典型移民，一直在追尋加國夢。年青時的母親白天在學校飯堂工作，晚上在日本餐廳當侍應，直至後來有了自己的花店；父親則擁有一間五金店。他記起：「我曾在爸爸的五金店工作了兩個暑假，深深體會賺錢不容易。 」
Andrew是獨子，父母終日埋首工作，令他不得不學會自得其樂。《家居裝飾》(Home Improvement)、《宋飛正傳》(Seinfeld)等處境喜劇，是他的樂趣泉源。大衛．賴特曼(David Letterman)的《週六夜現場》(Saturday Night Live)更啟發了他，開始表演棟篤笑。
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His mother is Vietnamese and his dad, also from Vietnam, of Chinese descent. They met in Canada — at a card game. “He fell in love with her, went home that night, and broke up with a girl he was seeing,” Phung side-notes. They sound fun-loving, but they were hard-working. Mom was a waitress in the earlier years, working at a school cafeteria by day, and a Japanese restaurant by night. Later, she had a flower shop. Dad, meanwhile, ran a metal shop. “My parents were always chasing the Canadian dream,” Phung says. “I worked two summers in the metal shop, which was so foundational in my understanding of how hard it is to make money.”
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Phung took refuge in acting the clown. “I was always a really silly kid,” he says. “Partly it came from being an only child, and having to entertain myself.”
The antics increased after he discovered the zingy improvisational comedy style of David Letterman on late-night television. Inspired, Phung soon was hosting his own simulated late-night talk show in his sixth grade class.
他認為有移民背景的人都承受不同程度的壓力，一生中的大部分時間追求完美，為出人頭地而全力拼搏。然而，即興演出卻令他有另一種體會：「這種表演方式不管成敗，都要放膽去試。現實中，你不會走入有灰熊藏身的洞穴；但即興演出正好相反，像走進明知有灰熊的洞穴去看會發生什麼事。」
Andrew在中學時期開始涉足即興演出，當中包括獨腳戲及團體表演。十二班時，學校邀請了Loose Moose Improv Company的演員到校分享，那次交流引爆了他的表演天賦。醉心演藝不但沒有令他荒廢學業，反而令他學業進步了。「因為我有了目標、有了方向！」另外，更讓他培養出正面、樂觀、不怕輸的精神。凡事都抱着「好呀，然後呢?」不斷向前的積極心態。他提出了一個頗現代的「語言轉換」概念，指靈活運用各種族語言，夾雜在話語中。某程度上，跟即興演出很相似吧？他認為 「人要去盡量適應和靈活面對任何情況。」
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Also influential were the sitcoms he grew up watching on TV at home, Home Improvement and Seinfeld, as well as Saturday Night Live. “It was the Will Ferrell, Adam Sandler and Cheri Oteri era,” Phung says. He absorbed it all. Comedy became a burgeoning passion, even to the point of performing for eight people in a church basement, on occasion. He also emceed other people’s gigs (which proved fairly lucrative at the time). But he didn’t think he’d ever do it full time — at university, he studied economics. “I thought I was going to have a corporate job,” he says. Improv remained a hobby until it wasn’t. “I quit my job in 2012 to pursue acting full time, with the encouragement and full support of my parents.”
大學主修經濟學的他，曾一度以為自己會成為白領一族，後來在父母的支持下，全情投入演藝事業。剛開始時，曾在教會地庫給只有八名觀眾演出，又曾兼職司儀。一直以來，Andrew 依然保存着對演出的那團火。
直至在大熱劇集《金家便利店》飾演Kimchee一角，劇中他以浮誇的造型(頭頂仿雞冠頭faux-hawk髮型)及角色設定，加上500對限量版運動鞋的收藏量， 引起廣泛關注。之後，由他參與創作及主演的處境喜劇《Run the Burbs》 更令他人氣高漲。劇中他化身為與現實生活很相似的Andrew Pham，飾演一位越南裔加拿大人，與印度裔的妻子育有分別十四歲的同性戀女兒及十歲的兒子，是一個新世代家庭的父親角色。
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When Kim’s Convenience came along in 2016, Phung suddenly had a national platform to show what he could do. He became a celebrity along the way. His role as Kimchee Han (best friend of main character Jung Kim) was such a scene-stealer that there was suddenly an explosion of articles being written about him, his faux-hawk hairstyle and his oh-wow collection of 500 pairs of sneakers. Phung’s star is still rising with Run the Burbs, a show he not only stars in but co-created. In it he plays Andrew Pham, a Vietnamese-Canadian, suburban, stay-at-home father to a 14-year-old and a 10-year-old. Wife Camille is of Indian descent. The daughter is queer.
Andrew認為《Run the Burbs》是《金家便利店》的精神延續，探索第一代移民的子女，長大成為父母後的種種，多少也是他的真實寫照。「我輩跟我們的父母很不同。以往父母跟我們相處的時間很少，但到了我們這一代，會跟子女說我愛你、會盡量抽時間跟子女相處、聊天，這都是我們的父母不會或是不可能跟我們去做的事」，他形容自己會過份補償地跟兒子說「我愛你」。
每當年輕人向他請教投身演藝圈的法門時，Andrew定會反問他們有什麼過人之處。「無論是去Second City演藝學校上課、參加網上課程，或者其他什麼都好，出去尋找機會吧我從來沒有放棄過任何機會。」
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Calling the cozy-funny show a kind of spiritual successor to Kim’s Convenience, Phung says that the idea is to explore what happens when the children of immigrants begin having children of their own. “We parent differently,” he says. “We parent knowing how much time our parents lost with us, so we are trying to fight that. We parent having conversations that our parents would not, or could not, have with us. We say I love you a lot to our kids.”
The sitcom is also very clearly a manifestation of his own stick-with-it-ness. When younger people ask him for advice about getting into the acting space, Phung tells them to take classes wherever they are available and to seek out opportunities to practice the craft: “I chased every opportunity.” He also tells them not to be afraid to fail, returning to one of the basic tenets of improv. “Momentum exists when you swing it yourself,” he says. “If you are on a swing, and you do not have someone pushing you, you have to pump yourself.”
最後，他提醒有意追尋演藝夢的人不要害怕失敗，緊記即興演出的基本原則。「當你推動自己、傾力演出的時候，動力就會出現。好像盪鞦韆時，假如沒人推，你就必須靠自己， 傾出盡力盪出去吧！」
“We imagine the jump, the spin or the trick so we can analyze all the movements, with the specific parts of our body throughout the jump, to make sure it turns out well. It is important to have a focused mindset.” This is how Daisy Li, a promising 13-year-old Chinese figure skater from Prince Edward Island, explains how she approaches a jump during a competition. It’s how she, quite literally, finds momentum.