Shut Up, You’re Welcome: Thoughts on Life, Death and Other Inconveniences by Annie Choi

Whenever someone tells me to shut up, I try not to return their thanks with a big-hearted “You’re welcome.” After all, I’ve just been told to shut up. But the title of Annie Choi’s new book makes me wonder whether I’m guilty of a tacit rudeness. What’s the polite reply to “Thanks for shutting up”? Cold, dead silence? Or that cheeky, cheery “You’re welcome?” 

Hard as I looked, I didn’t find the answer in any of the hilarious essays of Shut Up, You’re Welcome: Thoughts on Life, Death and Other Inconveniences. Instead I found sprightly anecdotes galore and prose technique to rival the best humorists now working in this style.  

Korean-American, LA-based Choi writes comedy for the page: standup-flavored material that’s meant to be read rather than heard. That’s not at all the same thing as writing for performance. In the books of some comedians (or their gag writers) seem to drip-feed a transcript of somebody’s act. It takes a doubly literary skill—joker and essayist—to narrate the funny so that it reads well. And it’s rare that a writer can pull it off as neatly as Choi does.

For example: 

“I like underwear. I like the things it does for me and everyone who wears it. When used properly, underwear prevents chafing, keeps things warm downstairs, and plays a vital role in public health. People have been wearing it for a long time; archaeologists have found loincloths that are seven thousand years old. It’s actually a surprise when someone doesn’t wear underwear – whether the surprise is pleasant or unpleasant depends on the circumstances.”

This sweetly understated passage opens the first of two chapters about a single piece of lost luggage. There’s underwear in the luggage, so its loss serves as the pretext for an in-depth panty essay. “…In college, I found myself making out with a guy and having a horrible realization: My underwear was not sexy. In fact, it was disturbing, a bit surreal maybe. Like underwear made by David Lynch and Pee-Wee’s Playhouse.”

Set-up, punchline. That quasi-standup quality again. The subject matter helps—it’s in the comedic tradition to fixate on awkward trivialities like ugly and missing underwear—but here it’s mostly down to style. Of course, in writing you can’t rely on gesture, face-pulling, ad libs, or any other of the performative aspects of actual standup. Instead, you have all the thrills of punctuation, syntax and paragraph structure.  

Shut Up, You’re Welcome mixes three literary forms: written monologue, mock epistle and dialogue-driven narrative. The content comes from the mundanities of Choi’s personal life: those unsexy panties, her first encounter with an avocado, growing up in the San Fernando Valley, being forced to watch musicals. So the book opens with a typically chatty letter saluting, “Dear Musical Theater”: 

“Let me be frank: I do not understand you. …Listen, if a guy came up to me wearing a white mask and wanted us to be lovers, I would Mace him. …If a group of cats were whining in an alley and prancing around the garbage cans, I’d have them spayed or neutered.”

I couldn’t agree more. Still, for someone who claims to hate musicals, Choi knows a surprising amount about them. Dozens of them.

Though the book starts out as a letter, it never really reads like one. (Oral exhortatives such as “Listen” tend to evoke speech, not correspondence.) Gradually we meet Choi’s family and innumerable zingers. On camping with the ‘rents: “Camping means poison ivy, which is nature’s version of an STD.” About Choi’s hard-driving mom: “She easily burns through a tank of gas every other day; the hole in the ozone layer is shaped just like her car.” On getting agitated: “I hate it when people tell me to relax or calm down. It makes me feel like my batshit outbursts aren’t warranted.”