Australian comedian Aaron Chen has found himself in a right pickle
Aaron Chen’s star continues to rise, with new pickleball comedy, 'The Dink'
By Ben Jhoty
AARON CHEN IS a little late to his scheduled interview with Esquire, apologising profusely for his tardiness, while offering a wholly unoriginal excuse: he was stuck in LA traffic. He’s now in Apple’s office in Culver City, he tells me, helpfully setting the scene, details of which he further furnishes by tilting his screen towards a construction site out the window.
“Nice,” I say, taking in a jumble of cranes and crevices.
“It’s pretty good, huh,” says Chen, the hint of a smirk curling the corners of his mouth, a feature that persists throughout our chat, along with, of course, his trademark deadpan delivery.
Chen is sitting on a couch wearing a two-tone blue long-sleeved rugby jersey while clutching an empty juice bottle. He’s here to talk about his new film, The Dink, a comedy about pickleball, in which he appears alongside Jake Johnson, Ed Harris, Mary Steenburgen, Ben Stiller and former tennis star Andy Roddick, in a gloriously po-faced cameo. It’s a whip-smart yet warm- hearted romp, one of the film’s many highlights being the chemistry between Johnson’s burnt-out former tennis prodigy who despises the rise of the bastardised miniature-court pastime and Chen’s overtly humourless club sidekick, PJ. While the odd-couple dynamic is hardly original, the two manage to combine for what you might call some deft volleying.
“It was awesome,” Chen says of working with Johnson. “Jake has just such good comedic instincts. He knows how to set you up for success and punchlines.”
Chen’s observations of Stiller, who produced the film and has a small part as an inexplicably horny physio, are typically idiosyncratic. “He’s very . . . he’s sneaky.”
I can’t help raising an eyebrow. “Sneaky?”
“Yeah. Like he can sneak around really well,” offers Chen in an explanation that serves only to deepen my intrigue as I picture the comic legend slinking stealthily around The Dink set.
Production on the film wrapped at the end of 2024. Chen remembers the shoot as “a good time”. His abiding memory is learning how to belly-flop for a pivotal diving scene. “I was kind of scared of diving into a pool because I dislocated my shoulder diving in 2022,” he says. “So I had to get diving instruction from an ex-military guy. I really belly-flopped and they [the filmmakers] really liked it.”
On pickleball, Chen describes himself as a player who’s at a “moderate level for an amateur”. He had played for a year before getting cast in the movie, he says, agreeing with my assessment that he wasn’t going into production cold.
“No. I would say, in fact, I was going in warm.”
“Lukewarm?” I venture, attempting to engage Chen in something of a verbal rally. He smiles politely.
Chen describes his character – a bumbag-sporting, visor-wearing collision of dorky irony – as “handsome, cool, suave and charismatic”.
His usual type, then? Chen grins.
Certainly, PJ is the latest in what’s becoming a line of lovable tone-deaf dags, following the actor’s breakout turn as George the probate clerk in Aussie hit Fisk. Does Chen worry about being typecast? Or is social dysfunction a comfortable niche he’s happy to inhabit?
“I feel like people give me work based on what they know, and I’m allowed to work within where I’m happy with, and that’s the case with this [The Dink] as well,” he says. “So basically, it was turning up, learning the lines and saying them.”
His willingness to demystify a profession that invites self-seriousness is rare and, you’d have to say, refreshing. The sense of clear-eyed detachment is perhaps because Chen’s first love remains standup comedy.
“I love all facets of doing standup,” he says. “I think it’s mostly about the immediacy and the engagement with the crowd. It’s kind of like a relationship where these are the people that you are talking to and they kind of inform how you talk about things and what you talk about. You’re present. It’s very present.”
Chen, now 30, famously broke into standup at 15, when he won ‘Class Clowns’, the Melbourne Comedy Festival’s standup competition for high school kids. Was he a class crown prior to being crowned one?
“Yeah, definitely,” he says. “I would make jokes and stuff. I wasn’t really loud or anything, but I would say funny things when called upon.”
Growing up in Sydney with his dad and sister [his mother died of breast cancer in 2000], Chen’s childhood saw him spend a lot of time by himself, on his computer. “I’d figure out a lot of things by myself,” he says. “I was pretty early on the internet because I was good at the computer. I was really good.”
His comic hero in those days was US comedian Mitch Hedberg. He also liked Carl Barron and Arj Barker. “Guys who would really write silly jokes.”
The last time he spoke to Esquire, Chen said he was making an effort to be objectively funny, explaining that he wanted his humour to resonate from Brooklyn to Bankstown. What does that mean in terms of his decisions as a comic? Does it mean going broader? Tapping into universal themes? Or just better jokes?
“I think it’s better jokes because broader doesn’t always translate to every place,” he says. “I think it’s the specificity that people relate to. Things that occur to you and you really feel, I think people can also feel that. I think the longer you do it, you find what makes you specifically funny.”
While being a Chinese Australian in America offers him fish-out-of-water novelty that could easily have become a calling card, Chen has been conscious about not getting trapped in a comic ghetto. “I try to dedicate a lot of stuff that’s not about being Chinese or Australian,” he says.
So, what makes Chen specifically funny? He can’t put it into words, he says, which is probably for the best – scrutinising your appeal is a fool’s errand and Chen, despite appearances and a growing body of work that would indicate otherwise, is not one of those.
The Dink premieres on Apple TV from July 24
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