I Just Read About That…

[ATTENDED: November 14, 2025] Aaron Chen

I have made a list of all of comedians from Taskmaster who I would like to see live.  It’s not everyone of course (some of them don’t do stand up and some I don’t think I would enjoy).  And then we started watching Taskmaster Australia and Taskmaster New Zealand, and I’ve added a dozen or so more to that list.

So I was pretty delighted that Aaron Chen announced a show at NJPAC–only ten days after Romesh Ranganathan.

I didn’t know if anyone here knew about him, but friends of ours knew him from the show Fisk (which is very funny). So good for him.  Aaron is currently living in the U.S.  And he made a big deal of coming all the way to Newark (from New York City).

He started right off by saying that he is from Australia and how he doesn’t look how he sounds–we don’t have that combination here.

He had a couple of the same ideas as Blake Freeman–they both talked about love languages, Drano and Fahrenheit.  Although the Fahrenheit was also about how we use feet and they use meters and we use pounds and they use kilos.  He then joked about how he’s doing so much math all the time.

–The conversion from Fahrenheit to Celsius is Fahrenheit minus 32 multiplied by 5 over 9.
[pause]
–What is that?
–A guy told me he was from Florida and it was 72.
–I’m like
[long pause]
–that’s warm.

He made a very funny joke about classes for smart people and he turned it into a very funny joke about racism.

I wasn’t entirely sure how much material he had prepared.  He fell back on saying things were “unbelievable” quite a lot–a nervous tic I suppose.

But he did a lot of jokes that were really funny.  His comedy is quite understated so a few jokes take a minute to sink in and that makes them all the funnier I think.

I was really glad we got to see him and I’m glad we get to watch him on Fisk.  He even made a joke about his success on Fisk because now his demographic has shifted to middle-aged white ladies and he’s very grateful.