An Asian American Comedy Milestone Riffs on a Kung-Fu Icon

The duality of that experience powers the conceit of Elliott Hong’s fish-out-of-water comedy They Call Me Bruce (1982). Stand-up comedian Johnny Yune, who also cowrote the film, plays an immigrant chef working for an Italian mafioso capo named Lil Pete (Bill Capizzi). After the protagonist clumsily stops a liquor store robbery and is hailed as “Hero, Bruce Lee Look-Alike” in a local paper, Lil Pete decides to use him as a stooge to transport cocaine to various mob partners around the U.S. Bruce thinks he’s delivering parcels of his “special Chinese flour.” What follows is a road trip from Los Angeles to New York City, during which Bruce stumbles into mishap after mishap while most of the time being totally oblivious to his predicament.

In the conventional canon of Asian American cinema, you’re unlikely to find They Call Me Bruce mentioned. This is in spite of the fact that it arrived right after Wayne Wang’s lauded debut, Chan Is Missing (1982), as arguably the second Asian American feature to ever gain theatrical distribution (and probably the first to turn a substantial profit). This makes its absence from the canon all the more curious, and both They Call Me Bruce and its primary creators are overdue a reconsideration.

Like their film, Elliott Hong and Johnny Yune are fascinating but largely forgotten. Hong, in particular, is an enigma; it’s hard to find much information about the Korean American filmmaker, though he directed several features—mostly independently produced action movies—beginning with Kill the Golden Goose (1979). They Call Me Bruce’s B-movie trappings—cheap production design, amateur action choreography—tend to fall somewhere between “so bad they’re good” and “just plain bad,” but it’s important to think about the film as a reflection of both its era and its limited budget, both of which have contributed to its neglect.

Yune enjoyed more recognition, and his starring role in They Call Me Bruce was a capstone to what had been an ascendant comedic career. He was also a Korean immigrant, and he got his start in Hollywood appearing in bit roles, including, appropriately enough, as a messenger in Kung Fu, a ’70s television show created by Bruce Lee. Yune’s big break came in 1977 on Johnny Carson’s The Tonight Show, and he became a minor staple of the late-night circuit and even hosted his own short-lived variety show in South Korea in the early ’80s. For a few years, he and Pat Morita were the two most visible Asian American comedians out there. The commercial success of They Call Me Bruce even led to an opportunity for Yune to codirect, write, produce, and star in a surprise sequel, They Still Call Me Bruce (1987), but his credits evaporated soon thereafter.

For They Call Me Bruce, Yune drew heavily from his stand-up act. A few jokes in the movie—including the line “I was once run over by a Toyota; oh, what a feeling!”—came directly from his stage routines. As the Bruce of the title, Yune plays an even more naive version of his stage persona: a well-meaning, self-identified “Oriental” who’s confused about American social (especially sexual) mores. Much of the film’s situational comedy comes out of his stumbling cluelessness.