It’s not particularly surprising to learn that comedian Sheng Wang is into plants. The comedian, who is performing at the Ryman Friday — his first solo performance in Nashville — has the perfect disposition for a botanist. He never rushes a joke, and he appreciates a slow, deliberate reveal. His first stand-up special, Sweet and Juicy — directed by his friend and fellow comic Ali Wong for Netflix in 2022 — leans into that measured pacing and knack for observation. He seems continually at ease. When I tell him that his delivery makes me think he must have grown up watching Def Comedy Jam, he acknowledges the influence, but amends it a bit.
“I definitely grew up watching Def Comedy Jam commercials,” he says. “But I didn’t have HBO as a kid. I mostly just watched PBS. I wasn’t even watching Seinfeld or Friends. Mostly it was just nature. I was running around the backyard, playing in the bayou, catching tadpoles and frogs and turtles and digging holes in the yard.
“That’s kind of where I’m going back toward — really being in awe of plants and life.”
By now it’s clear that being a sensitive kid has proven itself useful. Wang says his observational instincts might also be a byproduct of the immigrant experience. His family moved to Houston from Taiwan in the early 1980s, and he grew up as a member of an extended Taiwanese household.
“You’re in this weird world,” he explains. “You don’t fit in, or at least you don’t feel like you do. There’s a sense of being outside the norm, a sense of not belonging, that made me more observant.”
That mixture of sharp insight and mild-manneredness gives Wang a unique point of view that seems to resonate with comedy audiences. Sweet and Juicy was his first special, and it’s the way many of his fans discovered him — not through his work as a writer on the sitcom Fresh Off the Boat, or from the three episodes of Last Comic Standing he was on. It seems like an ideal environment for a comedian to break through — he’s approaching celebrity, but on his own terms.
Much of what lingers from Sweet and Juicy is about the indignities of aging — the wholesale purchase of lotion at Costco, the discovery that you can’t swing on monkey bars as well as you’d remembered. He spends several unhurried minutes on the ritual of using the pump of a near-empty bottle of lotion like a dipstick, twisting and dragging it across a leg as a way to evenly disperse moisture.
The new material, Wang says, is even more deliberately paced. “It’s evolved quite a bit since I started touring over two years ago,” he explains. “It’s pretty dense. It’s a little bit more poetic in some ways, and some jokes feel like they’re kind of a spoken-word piece, almost.”
His attention to rhythm and minute detail mirrors the way he describes engaging with the natural world — it’s an exercise in close observation rather than quick payoff.
“It just takes a moment of noticing. Appreciate how big that tree is, how thick that trunk is. Just noticing things is exhilarating, whatever it is. Any pattern, any design, anything that can heighten your understanding of this thing in your world a little bit more. That’s exciting, right?
“If you just look at anything, like a blade of grass,” he continues, “it’s doing its own thing. It’s just life living. Look at that thing and just recognize that there is something there that is also within you. And that that’s life. It’s got no baggage, it’s got no anxiety. It is thriving.”
