I was very nervous, and I thought that it wasn’t healthy at all.
It took a little bit of time to overcome my nervousness. After two weeks, on October 20, 2015, I did my first stand-up comedy gig and became the first Japanese female stand-up comedian in Vancouver. It was there I got an offer to be a stand-up comedian from a producer of the show. Around then, I started dating my boyfriend who was a stand-up comedian, and he took me out to his stand-up comedy show where he played as a headliner. I unexpectedly realized I liked being a comedian after hearing people’s laughter at my first line: “I’ve been married for three years, and it sucks.” The very first point was when I had a role in a comedy play - How Much Are Those Feelings in the Window? - in 2015. Can you tell us what launched your career as a comedian? PHOTO: DALE L We caught up with her earlier this year via Skype to find out more about how she got her start, her biggest influences and how comedy can help bridge cultural divides. And she’s finding plenty of fans: her YouTube channel, Yumi Tube, has amassed nearly 170,000 subscribers and a few of her performance videos have racked up one million views. It didn’t take her long to find her style: speaking heavily Japanese-accented English and touching on topics ranging from ethnic stereotypes to hidden aspects of Japanese culture. Splitting up with her husband in 2015, she took to the stage for the first time later that year. Through her time in Canada, Nagashima has been exposed to different cultures and perspectives, which have opened her eyes and led to her current career. When his visa was about to expire, she decided to get a working holiday visa and, in 2008, moved with him to Vancouver, where they married. While working at a conversation school, she became romantically involved with a colleague from Canada. The Vancouver-based performer has been enter taining crowds since she got her start in 2015, but her comedy career was a long time in the making.īorn in Tokyo, Nagashima graduated from Bunkyo University with a degree in English literature and became an English teacher. Those include, in no particular order, branching out into film, landing her own talk show, and creating a sitcom for her YouTube channel, which has 276,000 subscribers and counting.Yumi Nagashima - who simply uses the stage name “Yumi” - is the first Japanese female stand-up comedian to really take off in Canada. And she’s got ambitions beyond owning stages across the world. Nagashima has been taking her act around the globe, thanks to invitations from Montreal’s Just for Laughs showcase, the Jakarta International Comedy Festival, and Comedy Central Asia in Singapore. As her stand-up career has taken off, Nagashima has been the first to admit that her life has become more charmed than she ever would have imagined. Quickly, she figured out that being from Japan gave her a unique perspective on North Americans. And suddenly she knew what she’d been born to do. Nagashima got onstage for the first time in October of 2015. Her stand-up career began taking her places she’d never dreamed of, not only including the stages of Vancouver, but also New York, Los Angeles, Jakarta, Tokyo, Honolulu, London, and, um, Regina. This was before the 2019 release of her debut comedy album, My Name Is Yumi. For a while, the Tokyo born-and-raised comedian was told she needed to make herself sound more North American and less Japanese.
Let’s deal with the thing almost everyone wonders about right off the top: Yumi Nagashima’s accent is indeed real.
0 kommentar(er)
