Ronny Chieng namedrops AsiaOne in bittersweet story about dad’s death

After a night of comedy and laughter, Ronny Chieng ended his Singapore show last night (Sept 13) with a story about his dad’s death.

“People ask me why I always shit on my mum and I don’t shit on my dad,” he prefaced the segment. “It’s because I respect him a lot and also because he never really understood the comedy thing — he didn’t hate it but never really got it.”

The 37-year-old Malaysian comedian added that he never fought about it with his dad, but he could never update him about his career due to his lack of understanding.

When he got the gig on The Daily Show, the elder Chieng found out about it by reading the news and purportedly called up his son to ask, “Hey man, what’s this I hear about you getting hired on The Everyday Show?”

Ronny said that, despite not understanding his career, his dad was a well-educated man with a master’s degree in economics who retired from the corporate world to his farm in Johor Bahru, where he died unexpectedly in Dec 2018.

“When he passed away, I had to go home and hack into his computer,” Ronny continued, joking that he figured his password would be “the birthday of his favourite kid” — his sister — and he was “spot on” about it.

Ronny then checked his dad’s web browser history hoping to not find any porn on it.

“There were two websites that he would visit every day, one was AsiaOne.com and the second website he would visit was Twitter,” he said. “And at that point, I wished it were porn instead. Why were you on Twitter?”

But it turned out that his dad would visit Ronny’s Twitter feed daily at 7am and 7pm to check for updates and keep up with his son.

“That’s a very sweet story, but unfortunately, the last-ever tweet he saw from me was this apparently,” Ronny added, showing a tweet which said: “If you’re a baby boomer on Twitter, I already know you’re a f***ing loser.”

Though it was not directed at his dad, the realisation made Ronny subsequently “quit Twitter” as he did not want to portray the “worst version of himself” on the site anymore, even if it was just a joke.

Ronny nevertheless ended on a happier note, sharing that his dad’s phone wallpaper was one of Ronny and his wife.

He hoped that, despite looking at the tweet at 7am, the rest of his dad’s last day would have been more positive as he saw the photo of Ronny and his daughter-in-law instead.

Ronny performed in Singapore on Sept 12 and 13 at a sold-out Star Performing Arts Centre.

In attendance were Ronny’s castmates from Crazy Rich Asians — Janice Koh, Pierre Png and Koh Chieng Mun — as well as Pierre’s wife, Andrea De Cruz, Janice’s husband Lionel Yeo, former MTV Asia host Uttsada Panichkul and actor Ke Huy Quan.

His next stop is Sydney, Australia on Sept 15.