‘Ken Jeong: You Complete Me, Ho’ On Netflix: Doctor Giggles

Ken Jeong has a split personality, but it’s a clean break now.
Jeong grew up in North Carolina for the first half of his life, attending Duke undergrad and then the University of North Carolina for medical school. The year he graduated from medical school, he also won a stand-up comedy contest.
Eventually, he left the family doctor role behind, and became the crude and nude comedian and actor made famous by The Hangover movies. So when the 49-year-old enters The Ice House in Pasadena like a prize fighter, only to hand-gesture masturbation onto the front row of his audience, he’s doing so more as “Leslie Chow” than as Louis CK.
What happens when a doctor who’s funny decides to go all in on the funny? We find out in Jeong’s first stand-up special, You Complete Me, Ho on Netflix.

Before Jeong got Knocked Up, he was, in fact, a general practitioner at Kaiser Permanente in L.A.’s San Fernando Valley.

“Doing a Judd Apatow film and going back to your day job, thinking that you’re stuck. The next day, I could not stop thinking about that. I was like, ‘Well, maybe right now, I’m playing it safe, but maybe it’s time for this college kid to turn pro, you know what I mean?'”

So he did. Still, he did meet his wife through medicine. She’s Tran Ho, a Vietnamese-American doctor, and so the title of his comedy special achieves the double entendre meaning. From her, he also found a way into his breakthrough role. “Vietnamese is Korean on weed,” he acts out in one bit, “and that’s how I came up with Chow.”
The hour is full of stories about working on, and being recognized from, his role in three Hangover movies, as well as riffing about his ABC sitcom, Dr. Ken, and how he’d still be sad about its cancellation if he hadn’t hopped on a plane and shot his first scene for Crazy Rich Asians the following day. Jon M. Chu, who directed Crazy Rich Asians, also directed Jeong’s special.

He gets a shout-out here, as do movie co-stars such as Kevin Hart, Zach Galifianakis and Awkwafina.
Jeong veers back and forth between jokes about his nude scene, and the Asian hate-mail he received for it, to bits about his rich and famous lifestyle now, to how his medical expertise still always comes into play today.

But he released this on Valentine’s Day for a reason, and he devotes the final 15 minutes to his wife, joking about his courtship of her, about how she first saw him perform comedy at The Ice House, and how she has survived 10 years cancer-free since being diagnosed with breast cancer.
Turns out real Dr. Ken is sentimental at heart, and wasn’t exactly a Patch Adams in the doctor’s office, either. “Medicine is the best medicine,” he says at one point. Can you imagine the Jeong we know now delivering your diagnosis?
Good thing he quit his day job.
Sean L. McCarthy works the comedy beat for his own digital newspaper, The Comic’s Comic; before that, for actual newspapers. Based in NYC but will travel anywhere for the scoop: Ice cream or news. He also tweets @thecomicscomic and podcasts half-hour episodes with comedians revealing origin stories: The Comic’s Comic Presents Last Things First.

Watch Ken Jeong: You Complete Me, Ho on Netflix