Ronny Chieng blasts Baby Boomers in new Netflix Special

On By Littum

Ronny Chieng acknowledges the hypocrisy in his new Netflix stand-up special, Love to hate it. On the one hand, the first-generation immigrant chastises American culture for refusing to respect its elders. On the other hand, this Confucian value does not prevent Chieng from speaking out about the idiocy of Baby boomers.

There are the bigger issues – it’s a throwaway when Chieng accuses the Boomers of destroying the global financial economy in 2008 by chasing subprime mortgages. But it’s the little things—specifically, Boomer’s inability to go online without spreading misinformation, contracting viruses, or getting scammed—that really get him going.

“They don’t have the antibodies to handle the Internet,” he rages. “Watching Baby Boomers go on the Internet now is like watching babies wander into the kitchen by themselves, just looking for cookies on the kitchen counter, pulling knives right into their eyeballs.”

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Anyone with aging parents or grandparents will relate. Boomers might as well turn on the oven and stick their heads inside and look for pictures of their grandchildren. They fall for internet scams like pandas rolling down a hill. “Twenty Target gift cards? Yeah, that sounds like a legit way to pay for antivirus software on my phone.”

Even if Boomers can’t remember a single password, they’re still a virtual Russian cyber army that can make any misinformation go viral in the family WhatsApp group chat. How do they know the crazy story is legit? Hello, this is from cnn-nnnn.ru. Chieng bubbles over the idiocy of a generation that can’t even right-click.

Love to hate it is funny stand-up, but it’s secretly a thoughtful meditation on fathers and sons. The special opens with a profane tale of sperm storage and embryo freezing, a scheme that allows Chieng and his wife to one day have children while enjoying their current child-free life. “Kids are what you have when you’ve given up on your own hopes and dreams,” he jokes.

The comic’s struggle to deliver suitable genetic material to the doctors is a comical race to deliver humanity’s most embarrassing medical sample.

He imagines a worst-case scenario where his future son wants to grow up to be a stand-up comedian like dad. Chieng and his wife didn’t spend a fortune to create an A-grade blastocyst just for his child to become a B-grade comedian. “Go to law school!”

It’s an echo of the message Chieng got from his own father, the first person in his family to go to college and a successful businessman in Malaysia. Without context for the idea of ​​”show business”, Chieng’s father did not seem to have an appreciation for the comic’s success. “He wouldn’t understand what I do.”

Or would he? Like the best stand-up specials, Chieng subtly weaves together his various stories about children, parents and their responsibilities to each other in a surprisingly emotional conclusion. He never milks the bite or gets maudlin, which only makes it more affecting. Chieng argues that two things can be true at once – our idiot elders can drive us mad while still deserving of our respect.