With a runtime of an hour, Sheng Wang: Sweet and Juicy premiered on Netflix on September 6, 2022. The comedy special was written and performed by Sheng Wang, who was also the executive producer for the same, along with Ali Wong and John Irwin. Ali Wong also directed the episode and honoured Wang with a warm welcome to the stage. This is Wang’s first Netflix comedy special, and it was filmed at the Belasco Theatre in Los Angeles.
The official Netflix synopsis of the stand-up reads:
“Sheng Wang delivers a laid-back set on juicing, mammograms, how snoring is an evolutionary mistake and the existential angst of buying pants from Costco.”
-Sheng Wang: Sweet and Juicy Review Contains Mild Spoilers-
Being a comedian has much to do with the way you set up the scene you’re building up for the audience. On most days, monologues are monotonous, to say the least, and it’s all up to how you modulate your tone or engage the audience to keep them awhile.
However, Sheng Wang doesn’t resort to either of these tactics. There is basically close to no direct interaction with the audience. His voice is often flat, deadpan, with a faint smile crossing over his face at intervals. Nevertheless, it’s the same voice that makes it all the funnier.
The most significant takeaway from the episode is that Wang gets the angst of the adult middle-class person. The delivery of the same in the form of an easy-going monologue lays out several instances from his own life that can very well be a universal reflection of what the middle-class individual goes through. With all the bad habits that get inculcated in our routines, one of his deliveries sums up the experience quite well – “my mind wants to do all these things that my body does not execute”, like improving one’s bad posture.
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Wang reels several aspects of one’s life into his monologue. Heading out for mammograms, reading aloud to little kids while keeping up one’s confidence, grown Asian people loving ‘sweet and juicy’ fruits, his own addictive personality, procrastination, the misery that office jobs are, buying Costco pants at a certain age, the luxury of body lotions and eye cream, snoring dads and the dystopian healthcare system in the U.S.
A peculiar thing that I noticed while watching his latest stand-up is that you feel like he’s going to extend setting the scene and then drop the bomb. However, there are some anecdotes wherein he dropped it a bit earlier than expected, and though it could have come off as a failed landing, it does not.
Sheng Wang: Sweet and Juicy: Worth the Watch?
To set the record straight, the stand-up does take some time to build up to its crescendo. Sheng Wang meted out simple and light jokes at the beginning, and even though every statement of his can easily turn into a trending punchline, it also takes us time to ease into it and stay till the end.
Maybe it’s not Wang’s fault because the jokes land perfectly (almost always). It has more to do with us as the viewers who are now swimming in loads of stand-up comedies being published every other day. It tends to soften the blow and raise the expectations way before you hit the play button. One expects the comedian to speak in grandeur about the modern society we live in, that we’ve forgotten to enjoy light humour. The latter half of the episode takes it a notch higher, and it’s also reflected in the longer laugh sessions and applauses that the live audience dive into.
Sheng Wang announces that his mother often introduces him to her friends as a “clown with words”, and she’s not wrong. Yes, the middle class gets embroiled in calls for revolution and beating the system, but the living standards so produced for the same socio-economic class are exceedingly mundane. When looked at from a different perspective, it’s almost funny all the things we have to do to create a balance in our lives.
Wang observes those little details and rids them of the stressful premise they actually are set in, and in place of that, he fuels them with his jokes. These jokes are mindfully relatable, which is exactly what makes them humorous in the end. And so, watching him do his thing is a delight. Don’t pull away at the earliest because you think that the jokes aren’t hitting the right nerve, it’ll be your loss. It gets so much better and “juicy” (quite literally) by the end.
Sheng Wang: Sweet and Juicy is now streaming on Netflix.
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