Too Much Hot Sauce – Ryan Conner | Episode 271

In the first weeks after his brother Ut arrived from Vietnam, Ryan Conner’s mom wanted the new kid to feel at home. She was a great cook, but she lived in a town with one Chinese restaurant and one Japanese restaurant. So she made a shrimp dish and poured nearly a whole bottle of Sriracha over it. Everyone at the table sweated through dinner and pretended to love it, until it became clear that the guest of honor was struggling too. Okay, Ryan admits now, maybe there was too much hot sauce.

That scene holds most of this conversation: love that overshoots, and a family that never stops offering it. Ryan is one of twelve brothers. Seven were adopted: two from Vietnam, one from China, and four Black brothers who joined the family together. Marc and Greg ride with him from that kitchen table to the comedy clubs of D.C., New York and Los Angeles, and into his new memoir, 12 Guys Walk Into a Kitchen.

A Family That Kept Making Room

Marc read the book closely and keeps coming back to the grandparents. One grandfather ran a garage in a segregated town, and his only employee was a Black man named George, which was rare at the time. Another pair of grandparents picked greens for decades, crouched over a small bucket with a paring knife. Ryan traces the family’s habit of care through all of them. He calls it “the undercurrent” of his work rather than the overt part. Marc puts it another way: not virtue signaling, just the common thread of who they are.

That thread ran through Ut learning English from scratch. He was dropped into seventh grade after years in the rice paddies, recorded his classes on a mini tape recorder, and replayed them each night at the dining room table with their mom and a Vietnamese-English dictionary. It ran through the refugee families the Conners sponsored, too. The first family stayed with them for weeks in a four-bedroom house. When neighbors spread rumors to keep that family from renting, Ryan’s mom confronted it and found them a home.

Greg brings up race, and the talk many parents of color give their children about being pulled over, a talk he never got growing up. Ryan says that in his family these things were never theoretical. Everyone simply knew. He describes his stepdad’s family, who went from sharecropping in Georgia to the projects of North Philadelphia, and the lesson they passed down: you may only get one chance.

Comedy Is the Answer

Ryan was painfully shy as a kid and only spoke when called on. He wrote material for three years before he ever got on stage. Then he left an office job he describes as “more like tech support, honestly” and took a pay cut to work at the DC Improv. He handled the website and promotions and even waited tables a few nights, despite the server nightmare that still haunts him: ten tables, no drinks, nothing in the system. Greg waited tables for five years and confesses that he once set his own shirt on fire while lighting table candles.

About eight months into Ryan’s career, Mitch Hedberg watched his set, found him in the green room, and told him to quit his job. Ryan said he had bills. Hedberg told him that no matter the question, comedy is the answer. He wrote his phone number on a napkin, which now hangs framed in Ryan’s office. Ryan tells, with real tenderness, how close they became in the short time before Hedberg’s death.

From there the conversation turns to craft. Ryan once stretched an opening set to 45 minutes because Dave Chappelle was still at dinner. Another time he held the stage for an hour until Paul Mooney arrived, and Mooney admitted afterward that he had done it on purpose to give Ryan the challenge. Ryan explains why every opener needs a plan B, why he walked away from TV-friendly one-liners in New York, and why, once he got to Los Angeles, he’d rather work with a shovel than do stand-up he doesn’t like.

Titles, Crowd Work and a Little Decency

Marc admits that Ridiculousness plays at his house most nights before bed, and he finally gets to ask who writes those strange little titles. That was the job, Ryan laughs. He wrote for the show from its early days to its final episode. Greg asks whether comics who work their bits out on stage are really writing. Ryan thinks they are, in their own way, though he swears by the page. He passes along Colin Quinn’s reply when Ryan complained that most comics don’t write an hour a day: “Try an hour a year.”

The sharpest friction of the ride comes with crowd work and roasts. Greg raises Ron White’s distaste for crowd work, and Ryan goes further. To him, staged social-media crowd work isn’t stand-up at all, and it is creating the very hecklers comics complain about. He loves the classic roasters, but a recent roast night where comics went after friends’ real tragedies left him furious. Marc connects that to a wider culture that has made cruelty more permissible. Greg brings up Lenny Bruce’s argument that repeating slurs could empty them of power. Ryan agrees with the philosophy but won’t be the one to say the words. When Greg recalls Sarah Silverman being stung by a roast joke and treating it as a nerve of her own to examine, Marc calls it a kind of ego vaccination.

The Long Way Home

Ryan talks about his first novel, The Party, a philosophical comedy about fascism told by two prisoners whose accounts don’t quite line up. He also talks about his upcoming wedding, his third. “Three’s a charm,” Greg offers. When Ryan floats a very tiny ceremony, Greg reminds him that with his family, very tiny doesn’t exist. Marc thanks Ryan for leading him to the fourth movement of Sibelius’ Symphony No. 2, music you have to sit with long enough to get inside. Then Marc declares this the longest ride in Moped Outlaws history.

Asked Eminem or Foo Fighters, Ryan picks Eminem without much agony. He respects the Foo Fighters; they just never resonated. Before anyone can say goodbye, Greg asks whether he ever played the Brainwash in San Francisco. He hadn’t. But it turns out he had been in Marin three days earlier, dropping off his dog in Larkspur, and he promises to let the brothers know the next time he’s playing nearby.

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