Atsuko Okatsuka has one million Instagram followers. She’s also the second Asian-American woman ever to land an HBO comedy special (the first being Margaret Cho, in 1994) and frequently goes viral on TikTok for dancing in supermarkets with her 91-year-old grandma or making jokes about her bowl haircut. But outside of her professional success, the 37-year-old says she’s still not quite sure how to be an adult. She doesn’t do the dishes. She doesn’t clean her apartment. “I asked my husband the other day how to turn on the washing machine,” she admits in her new comedy special, now out on Hulu.
Her fans affectionately call her “Mother.” But, as she listened to friends complain about husbands who never helped around the house, she realized a more apt nickname would be “Father.”
In her new special, titled Father, accordingly, the comedian, who is half Japanese, half Taiwanese, talks marriage, co-dependency, adult friendships, and the always anxiety-inducing platitude to be your “true self.” The special could have simply been called “Adulthood” if it weren’t for its other narrative thread—Okatsuka’s actual father.
In her 2022 HBO special, The Intruder, Okatsuka discussed growing up in her uncle’s two-car garage in West Los Angeles with her mother and grandmother. The three had emigrated from Tokyo when Okatsuka was eight, though her grandmother told her they’d be in the U.S. for only a two-month vacation. In Father, Okatsuka reveals the other side of that story: her grandmother and mother had effectively kidnapped her from her father, who, as she discovered later, had full legal custody of her at the time. She didn’t reconnect with him until she was 15 years old.
“I was going through puberty in a garage,” she tells me of the retrofitted apartment where the family lived, undocumented, for seven years, which felt especially small when her mother, who is schizophrenic, was having an episode.
As a shy kid who mostly spent time with adults, since her mother and grandmother didn’t know how to drive (and couldn’t apply for driver’s licenses given their undocumented status), Okatsuka first started coming out of her shell in the seventh grade, when she realized she could make people laugh. One day her teacher didn’t show up to school, and a classmate speculated that she’d eloped with her long-term boyfriend. Okatsuka wisecracked, “He hasn’t proposed in 12 years. Why would he propose now?”
For Okatsuka, freedom began at 16. She got a car that year, allowing her to venture out on her own—though she mostly just drove the same route, to her boyfriend’s house, in Santa Clarita. “I’m a scaredy-cat,” she says. “I think after unwillingly moving around as a kid, I’d had enough moving and surprises.”
After high school, Okatsuka followed her first boyfriend to the University of California, Riverside, where she planned to major in psychology. “I was naturally drawn to [it] because of my mom,” she says. “I had seen her suffer all her life.” Okatsuka soon discovered she was far more interested in film, ultimately dropping out after her freshman year, at 19, to focus her attentions on creating avant–garde shorts (“Movies where we’re filming trees, and then crinkling paper, and that’s the audio behind it, and it means life is short or something”). The films helped her secure a place at CalArts, where she completed her bachelor’s degree and earned her master’s in both film and creative writing. Around the same time she arrived at CalArts, a friend suggested she try stand-up.
Okatsuka found her first stand-up class on Craigslist. “You shouldn’t look for things like that on Craigslist,” she says, but, luckily, “it was a real class; it wasn’t just a man with an axe, waiting.” The class was called “Pretty Funny Women,” and for 12 weeks she learned stand-up surrounded by a group of aspiring female comedians. Drawing inspiration from the well-known, deadpan comic Tig Notaro, she developed a dry, witty set. “There was a naturalness to it. People would say, ‘Oh, you’re just naturally funny. You can say anything.’ So I felt really proud of that.”
Still, she hesitated to pursue comedy full-time. “You need a lot of self-confidence to be able to wake up and be like, ‘I am a comedian, and this is it,’” she says. Seeing those who had that confidence, she asked, “You have good parents?”
It took meeting her husband, the actor and artist Ryan Harper Gray (and the director of Father), to help her make the leap. They met when Okatsuka was 28. At the time, she was juggling three jobs—dogwalking, working as a dance-fitness instructor, and teaching cinema at CalArts. After seeing her perform a stand-up set, Gray offered to take on more part-time work as a waiter so she could focus on comedy full-time.
By 2017, she’d found her signature hairstyle (a blunt bob she calls a “villain’s haircut”) and started gaining attention from the dance and stand-up videos she posted on TikTok and Instagram. But her Internet fame truly skyrocketed during the coronavirus lockdown—thanks in part to her “Drop Challenge,” a series where she unexpectedly drops her rear end to the floor in mid-conversation or in unlikely spots such as the supermarket to the beat of Beyoncé’s “Partition.” Her grandma is usually in the background, looking on in amusement.
Most of these stories come together in Father, where, true to Okatsuka’s brand, she finds humor in her complicated life. She even pokes fun at her own trauma: “I knew it was bad when Ira Glass reached out to me,” she says in the special, referring to her 2023 interview on the radio show This American Life. “Ira called me [and] said, ‘Atsuko, you are an inspiration.’ I said, ‘That’s not good … If you ever find yourself being one, that means someone fucked up.’”
Father is available for streaming on Hulu
Jeanne Malle is a Junior Editor at Air Mail
