Our 2022 Annual Report continues with the announcement of Joel Kim Booster as our Comedian of the Year. As the year winds down, stay tuned for more awards, lists, and articles about the best music, film, and TV of 2022. Plus, check out our Top 25 Films of 2022 list here.
2022 was the biggest, wildest year of Joel Kim Booster’s career, and he got through it by being in love. “I spent so long looking forward to this moment, and it’s been really hard to try to sort of live in the moment and enjoy it,” he tells Consequence. “And I think the only reason I survived, and it was something that I never expected, was having the grounding presence of my partner and my boyfriend throughout it.”
This was a year that saw the actor, writer, and comedian release his first Netflix standup special and star in the critically acclaimed Fire Island — which, no big deal, he also wrote. In fact, the day after we spoke via phone for his 2022 Comedian of the Year interview, Booster became an Independent Spirit Award nominee in the Best First Screenplay category.
In addition, he was featured on the Maya Rudolph-starring Apple TV+ series Loot, and made a wide range of guest appearances across the television landscape, including his new favorite thing: celebrity editions of game shows. “I’m hounding my reps to see what other game shows they can get me on,” he says. “It’s the best fringe benefit of my summer in general, being on every celebrity version of anything that needs at least one celebrity that 90% of the audience goes, ‘Who is that? How are they a celebrity?’ I’m happy to fill that role in as many celebrity versions of game shows as possible.”
And through it all, he’s been in a relationship, which is something he never expected. “I always pictured myself reaching this success and then settling down and finding that person. But what I realized is that I’m so grateful that the reverse happened — that I found the person and then this all happened. Because without him grounding me on Earth, I don’t know exactly how I would’ve handled or not handled the pressure of this year and the success of this year, quite honestly.”
Booster’s most high-profile 2022 moments all happened to land in June, including Psychosexual, his first hour-long standup special for Netflix. “This special is really sort of a meta-commentary on representation,” he told Consequence earlier this year. “Because I get pulled into being a representative: I represent the gay community, I represent the Asian community… So a lot of the special, through these bits, is very self-aware about what makes me a bad representative and what makes me a good representative and all of these things, and really my struggle to not want to be a representative at all. That’s sort of the throughline of the set.”
With Psychosexual complete, he’s now working on material for a new hour. But, as he says now, it’s “frustrating because my last Netflix special, which is the culmination of a couple of years of work, was crafted on a minute level over the course of several years of going up at bar shows and doing shorter sets. Now, most of the time that I’m doing standup, I’m doing headlining shows and I’m doing an hour’s worth of material, so I’m not getting the same amount of workshop time to focus on those individual pieces. I’m usually just getting to hit them in the context of an entire sort of roughly drawn hour right now.”
