Comedy fans across Australia could soon be welcoming a smartly satirical sitcom about the life of an international student to their screens. Ronny Chieng: International Student is one of six shows in the running to win a national spot on ABC’s Comedy Showroom.
The show is a semi-autobiographical comedy about a Malaysian student – “blunt, barbed and not afraid to cut through BS” – who struggles to get along with fellow students when he enrols at university in Australia.
“You don’t have to be an international student to get this story”
It is being pitted against five other pilots commissioned by ABC, which will each be aired in the coming weeks on the network’s Comedy Showroom.
Penned by Malaysian-born comedian and Melbourne University alumnus Ronny Chieng, the pilot draws on Chieng’s experience of not fitting in on campus when he came to Australia to study.
“International Student is the hilarious story of Ronny Chieng, a Malaysian student in Australia to study law,” says the show’s synopsis. “Only making friends is not part of the curriculum.”
Chieng, who is taking a break from his current role as a correspondent on The Daily Show in the US, hopes that the public will vote for his pilot to win after seeing it air last week.
In an interview with the Guardian, Chieng said the role he plays is himself but “exaggerated for comic effect”.
“You don’t have to be an international student to get this story, I hope, or Asian or a student,” he said. “This story is about that weird period of life where everyone’s trying to fit in.”
“We all came here for a few years, we studied, then all my friends left – they went back to Singapore, Malaysia,” he added. “It almost feels like a dream. I wanted to capture that moment for the record.”
For more information about all of the competition entrants, click here.
