Columnist Lisa Ferguson: Comedy career is a walk in Park for Whang

Lisa Ferguson

Friday, March 26, 2004 | 8:22 a.m.

Some people can't seem to fathom that Suzanne Whang might actually be funny. Given her day job, that could be a logical conclusion to draw.

For the past four years, she has served as the pleasant, soft-spoken, well-mannered host of "House Hunters," the top-rated show on cable's HGTV (Cox cable channel 64). Each week she leads viewers on a fly-on-the-wall tour following potential home buyers as they endure the processes of locating and finally purchasing their dream homes.

"On a daily basis, somebody runs up to me just freaked out, and I think there's a spider on me or something but, no, it's the fact that they love 'House Hunters,' " Whang (pronounced "wong") says. "Everybody's got their own opinion about what kind of house they would like and how they would fix it up, and I think that's why people love it."

Aside from the series, Whang is also an actress and a stand-up comic who has spent the last three years breathing life into her alter-ego, Sung Hee Park. Dressed in traditional Korean garb and speaking broken English, she takes comedy-club stages and remains in character throughout the act, spewing one off-color, racially charged, politically incorrect joke after another, with naive Sung Hee unaware she's probably offending audience members.

"I think it's funny how people think, 'How could you possibly host "House Hunters" and be a stand-up comedian?' " says Whang, who wraps what she claims is her first paid, professional comedy gig tonight through Sunday at The Improv at Harrah's. "Just because my 'House Hunters' persona is much more conservative and sort of the girl next door, that doesn't mean that's all that exists within me."

In fact, there's likely a lot that most casual "House Hunter" viewers don't know about Whang, a former Navy brat who graduated from Yale University with a psychology degree, and followed up with a master's degree in cognitive psychology from Brown University.

It was while working for a health-care consulting firm in Boston that she attended a casting call for the former ABC series "Spencer for Hire," and began dabbling in acting. Soon after, she quit her office job and became a full-time thespian, and has since appeared on "NYPD Blue," "The Norm Show," "Strong Medicine" and "V.I.P.", among others. Those roles, she says, led to several gigs as a television host, including working alongside Dick Clark on "TV Censored Bloopers 98"; as a roving reporter for "Breakfast Time" (on cable's FX network) and "Fox After Breakfast"; and, most recently, "House Hunters."

Whang set her sights on stand-up comedy while studying acting at the Beverly Hills (Calif.) Playhouse, where she devised and performed an act for her classmates based on the racial queries she received while traveling the country as a TV reporter -- "Things like, 'Do you speak Oriental?', as though that's a language. Or, 'How does that dry-cleaning process work?' "

Much to Whang's dismay, her professor urged her to instead try "embracing the stereotypes" she so loathed about Asian woman in her act. She did so begrudgingly, and in the process birthed the Sung Hee Park character, who specializes in telling "these horrific, racist jokes that are overtly sexual, inappropriate-reference jokes," Whang explains. "She just heard them somewhere and wrote them down; she doesn't even know what they mean, but she's just trying her best."

As is Whang, who in 2002 was named Best Up & Coming Comedian at the Las Vegas Comedy Festival. She describes the character and her act "a satire of racism in America." Sung Hee is "making fun of racism and other races and of stereotypes, and also of the whole venue of stand-up comedy by doing it wrong and breaking every rule."

She compares Sung Hee to Archie Bunker on "All in the Family," reminding, "He was a horrific bigot, and somehow he was endearing, and you're rooting for him and you're laughing, but you're also very disturbed by it."

It's especially gratifying to Whang (who declines to reveal her age) that her act stirs emotions and, oftentimes, controversy. "Nobody watches it and goes, 'I don't remember that,' or 'I was indifferent to that.' People seem to think it's the funniest thing they've ever seen, or they get very angry at me because they claim that I'm perpetuating racism and stereotypes when it's exactly the opposite."

However, unlike Sung Hee, Whang insists that a stereotypical "Asian-born-Asian" woman would likely be "shrinking in the corner of a comedy club -- she wouldn't be up onstage ... One of the stereotypes of Asians is that we take ourselves too seriously, we can't laugh at ourselves." About those folks, she says, "Their response is more stereotypical than my act."

Though she plans to continue her hosting and acting duties (look for her in the forthcoming Keanu Reeves sci-fi flick "Constantine"), Whang is also working to turn Sung Hee into a cottage industry of sorts. She's devised concepts for a pair of television vehicles in which the character would star, and is also penning a screenplay based on her fictional rise through the stand-up comedy ranks.

"I can see creating some sort of venue for Sung Hee Park to suddenly become the next Austin Powers -- the next character-driven entity that can do feature films or a television series, and I know that it's going to be one of those things that's talked about," Whang says. "She can almost exist on her own. I can see myself having my own separate acting career, my own hosting career, and then Sung Hee is just like her own person."

Out for laughs

How exactly does one go from being a professional figure skater to performing stand-up comedy? Given her firsthand experience, Nancy Ryan will likely be more than happy to explain the transition during her performances through Sunday at The Comedy Stop at the Trop.

Willie Barcena -- a frequent headliner at The Improv at Harrah's, who was the subject of Laugh Lines on Aug. 1, 2003 -- has a new day job: Earlier this year, the funnyman from East Los Angeles moved north to Sacramento to host his self-titled, morning-drive-time show on hip-hop/R&B radio station KSFM-102.5 FM.

In case anyone was wondering, Bob Zany has exactly 1,800 new hairs on his head. See them in all their glory by logging onto www.bobzany.com and checking out the before-and-after photos of his hair-transplant procedure (he doesn't call himself Zany for nothing, folks). Better yet, ogle the comedy veteran's fancy follicles in person when he plays Riviera Comedy Club April 12 through April 14.