Atsuko All the Way

Thanks to her singular energy and her many viral videos-not to mention her trademark bowl cut, which inspires fans to buy wigs for her shows-Atsuko Okatsuka has become one of the most beloved stand-up comics around

- By Devin Gordon. Photographs by Mark Seliger

HAVE YOU EVER seen a Japanese reality show called Old Enough? Smash hit for decades that became a popular late-pandemic binge on Netflix here in the US. The gist is parents send their adorable toddlers out into the grown-up world to run a series of simple errands-pick up vegetables from the store, deliver a letter to a friend and a camera crew tracks them from an extremely safe distance so we can watch what happens. It's the best show ever made. Better than The Sopranos. The kids get distracted so easily, they make wrong turns, they stop to tell strangers about their friend who's a frog. On average they complete two out of three errands.

Atsuko Okatsuka, the stand-up comic, identifies with those kids so much that she made a spoof of it last year for the Netflix Is a Joke comedy festival in Los Angeles. In her version, Arsenio Hall sends her out onto the streets to return a friend's notebook-"Oh, she needs that!"-and pick up her festival swag bag, and take a selfie with a famous celebrity. "It should be easy for a grown comedian," says the Japanese narrator. It's not. She manages to complete the first two tasks but the last one is too hard. She winds up snapping a photo with a tourist who looks like Timothée Chalamet.

"I feel confident she's friends with leprechauns," says Tig Notaro, Atsuko's close friend and fellow comic, who directed her breakout 2022 HBO special, The Intruder. "But she wouldn't even realize she was talking to a leprechaun."