How TikTok Comedian Charlene Kaye Went From Pop Singer to Stand-Up

L
ike all good children of immigrants, Charlene Kaye greets me with a gift. The shirt is emblazoned with neon-pink lightning, the title of her comedy show, Tiger Daughter, in a Def Leppard font, and a collage of images — including a photo of her mother, Lily, well, naked as the day she was born.

“These are nude portraits that my mother made of herself. This is my mother’s shadow looming over me,” Kaye explains, dragging her nails over the collage. “When I was making this, it was so funny, because it occurred to me how similar we are. Oh! And this is us both showing our ass, because it runs in the family.”

Tiger Daughter: Or, How I Brought My Immigrant Mother Ultimate Shame slots neatly into the trend of storytelling that fuses comedy and personal testimony. Previous big-name entries, like Jerrod Carmichael’s Rothaniel and Mike Birbiglia’s The Good Life, have mastered the formula. Kaye’s version, if the full title isn’t clear enough, has a familiar outline: First-gen immigrants become parents in the West, hoping their sacrifices will be rewarded with a doctor or lawyer child; child goes another way; conflict ensues. Over the course of about 60 minutes, Kaye uses photos of her and her mom, as well as real texts between them, blown up and projected behind her onstage, to chart her life and career milestones and her mother’s response to them. Ultimately, she tries to answer the question of whether you can truly love someone without ever fully understanding them. It’s a PowerPoint presentation that plops the crowd directly into Kaye’s inner turmoil and asks if they relate. And based on the applause she receives at the end, it seems they do.

“Everyone has disappointed their parents in some way,” Kaye tells me, one hand lazily stirring her coffee at a cafe in Brooklyn’s Flatbush neighborhood. “You’re never gonna be that ideal. You have to figure that out for yourself.”

Hitting All the Right Notes

The vast majority of people who’ve heard of Kaye know her not from Tiger Daughter but from the wildly popular music parodies she puts out online. Think “Every Chappell Roan Song” and “Every Charli XCX Song” — affectionate riffs that poke fun at an artist’s musical and lyrical tendencies while celebrating their work all the same. (The Taylor Swift one has more than a million views.) But the reason she’s so adept at breaking down what other musicians do is that she is one herself — a really, really good one.

Kaye’s Mad Libs CV goes something like this: While attending the University of Michigan, the classically trained piano and guitar player toured with Team StarKid, the musical theater troupe that shot to internet stardom in 2009 with its viral Harry Potter musical parody, A Very Potter Musical. After, she released solo pop-rock music under the moniker KAYE (the surname of her step­father, Marty). There were also the five years she fronted the indie-rock band San Fermin, where, she says, she evolved into an “outrageous, ballsy performer.” She did her solo work on the side, singer-songwriter stuff she calls “very deep and dark and earnest.”

“I wanted to be a Mitski or Phoebe Bridgers,” Kaye says. “But it wasn’t taking off. Music is so youth- and beauty-obsessed. That’s something I got tired of, because I feel like the music industry tries to keep you 25 forever.”

All along, Kaye’s internet presence grew, especially as she showed off more of her comic instincts. In 2022, she posted the first video in her now-legendary Guitar Center series, where she grabs merchandise off the wall and, in her words, “terrorizes” male employees and shoppers by purposely butchering popular riffs, like the opening notes of “Smoke on the Water” or “Sweet Child O’ Mine.” In some clips, a man approaches and corrects her. “Rock music is such a boys’ club,” Kaye says. “I want to just take it down in seriousness.”

The irony, as some commenters on those posts have pointed out, is the amount of music theory and technical know-how you’d have to have to fuck up these songs just so. At 38, all of Kaye’s intensive musical training has led her to a completely new sphere of entertainment. “I’m a total music-head, and it’s probably why I’ve had a lot of success in the short-form comedy space,” she says. “Because I understand the tropes of different artists, so I’m able to map it out academically in this way that’s very satisfying to me. And it turns out, it’s satisfying to others as well.”

One of those fans is the trailblazing comedian Margaret Cho, who found Kaye through TikTok and has since become “obsessed.” Last fall, Cho launched a yearlong residency as a curator at the iconic New York venue Joe’s Pub with Kaye’s show. “She’s an absolute rock star! She shreds!” Cho tells Rolling Stone in an email. “She’s a captivating performer, hilarious and exciting to watch! [Tiger Daughter] is a show that’s been a long time coming.”

Good Girl Gone Bad

Kaye traces her love of comedy to the stars of her youth — Tenacious D, Flight of the Conchords, Adam Sandler — “basically just a bunch of funny white dudes” she and her sister enjoyed watching as kids growing up in Arizona. Back then, comedy, and even theater, felt like a club she was on the outside of because she was Asian American. “I auditioned for Peter Pan when I was in third grade, and I got cast as an Indian,” she says. “The same thing happened to my sister, and I internalized that as there are no roles for me.”

But performing was in her blood. As Kaye discusses in Tiger Daughter, her mother — who clearly has a dramatic flair, and her own signature rock & roll style — entered the biggest reality-show singing competition in Singapore three times; twice she placed second. When her mom signed up Kaye for all kinds of musical lessons, it activated that performer’s DNA.

Playing guitar from a young age “taught me how to connect and to be bodily aware of myself on a stage,” Kaye says. The StarKid years took that stage presence to a whole other level. “If you were on Tumblr in 2012, and if you were a Harry Potter fan or a Glee fan, then you were hysterical about this,” she says, running her hands through her candy-apple-red-streaked hair. “The venue capacities [were] thousands and thousands of people, and the fans were frightening. One girl showed up and she had the signatures of all seven StarKids on the tour tattooed on her calves, wrapped in plastic and bleeding. We had one girl who faked a seizure at the VIP meet and greet so that one of the guys would catch her. Later she tweeted, ‘best seizure ever.’”

During the pandemic, Kaye took acting classes at a studio that specializes in the Meisner technique, a practice that prioritizes the emotion in a performance (and performer) over the words. When a classmate invited her to join a theatrical showcase, she turned a Google doc of “all the crazy shit” her mom has done into the skeleton of a show. “I didn’t have experience doing stand-up,” Kaye says. “It was just this very specific story I had. That was my segue.”

Tiger Daughter traces Lily’s antics, like asking her daughter to urgently Photoshop her face onto other women’s bodies. It also includes painful moments that bring the audience to a hush, such as Kaye’s discovery of an interview her mother had given calling Charlene a “spoiled and entitled” disappointment who brought the memory of her late father Marty shame. Kaye acknowledges in the show the hardships her mother faced as a young woman in Singapore: food scarcity, poverty, and the dream of being a famous singer that never materialized. This dream, abandoned in Lily’s life but pursued by her daughter, is at the core of their push-pull relationship.

“Perfection has always been a form of safety for me. If I didn’t achieve then I was afraid I’d be loved less,” Kaye says. “How can I possibly repay [my parents] for the monumental sacrifices they made? Is it selfish to pursue my own joys, even if they are kind of outrageous? How do I choose myself over and over again if it’s hurting somebody else?”

Tiger Daughter — which Kaye recently toured in Melbourne, Australia — doesn’t pretend to have answers. Instead, Kaye rehashes every hurt, fight, deranged Whats­App request, and crying voicemail onstage, in the hopes that sharing it with an audience will bring her closer to some form of healing.

In the meantime, she’s keeping the musical comedy coming. She’s started a femme Radiohead cover band called Labiahead, and has ideas for plenty more sex-pun bands. (These include “Sister of a Down,” “Limp Biz Clit,” and “Twink-182,” which she says should only be made up of gay artists.) And if, even after pouring her heart out night after night for years, she’s still best known for her parodies, she’s OK with that. “The irony is that now I’m doing Tiger Daughter, but when I get stopped on the street, it’s because I’m the Taylor Swift girl from TikTok,” Kaye says. “Which is hilarious. That’s my legacy.”