Near the end of his Netflix special Funny Garden, Aaron Chen checks in with his New York audience. “Did any of you come to the show because you know me from Fisk?” he asks. A chorus of enthusiastic whoops answers. “It changed my life,” he says. It’s a good setup for a joke about how his audience shifted overnight from 90% men aged 25 to 34 (“This is not a good demographic. A lot of incels”) to women aged 45 to 54 (“These beautiful, white angels!”). But, like much of his comedy, there’s a twist of sincerity.
“It did really change my life,” Chen tells me. Fisk, the ABC’s hit sitcom about a beleaguered suburban probate law firm, put Chen – who plays probate clerk come self-styled “webmaster” George – on the map not only in Australia (where he won a Logie in 2025) but also the US, where the series landed on Netflix in August 2023. When Chen moved to the US that very month, he found he already had a small but enthusiastic fanbase. “I was shocked that people in crazy places like Burlington, Vermont, would be coming to shows.”
Kitty Flanagan as Helen and Aaron Chen as George in Fisk season three. Photograph: ABC
The 30-year-old has had a bumper few years. It started with Fisk, which premiered in Australia in 2021 and was an immediate hit, going on to two more seasons. Two more surprise hits followed: the ABC gameshow Guy Montgomery’s Guy Mont Spelling Bee, in which Chen played the host’s delightfully deadpan assistant; and season three of 10’s gameshow Taskmaster Australia, which Chen won.
At the end of 2024, he filmed his first feature film: the Ben Stiller-produced comedy The Dink, starring Jake Johnson as a washed-up tennis pro turned pickleball champ and Chen as his best friend (it’s slated to premiere on Apple TV in July). Then 2025 brought a Logie for best comedy actor, for his role in the third season of Fisk; and a spot on Late Night with Seth Meyers. When we speak he’s just wrapped a US tour supporting Ali Wong; next month he will play an intimacy coordinator alongside fellow Australian comedian Sam Campbell in the new HBO comedy series Make That Movie.
But when I ask Chen what the standout moments of his last few years have been, he goes straight to the grind of touring. “The highlights are always doing standup comedy,” he explains. He’s hoping the Netflix special will boost audiences for his live shows. (Though it’s too early to judge its impact in the US, Funny Garden debuted in Netflix’s top 10 in Australia.)
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Filmed in New York, where Chen is based, Funny Garden collects his best material from three years spent touring and doing club spots in the US, and draws heavily from his outsider perspective on his new home country, while riffing on his Chinese-Australian identity. “I love America, you’ve got diversity here,” he tells the crowd. “Well, not in this room.”
Chen is a master of the one-liner, delivering observational comedy in bite-size chunks. Generally, his material is gently offbeat. The spikier barbs – a quip about vaccines and autism, say – are often followed by a sweetly dimpled smile and a little chuckle. It’s disarming, and thoroughly charming.
Chen has been honing his craft for half his life, starting off doing open-mic nights in Sydney after winning the Class Clowns national competition for high schoolers in 2012, aged 16.
His breakthrough came in 2017: he won best newcomer at Melbourne international comedy festival for his first solo show, and he started getting booked on TV shows like Get Krack!n. Then his weekly live comedy show John Conway Tonight – an absurdist spoof of US nightly shows, in which Chen played the sardonic sidekick to the titular host – was picked up by ABC for its new digital channel. It was a short-lived experiment – less than six months all up – but when Conway departed the show due to illness, Chen was subbed into the host role, at the tender age of 22.
“It was a big time of growing up,” Chen reflects. “I made a lot of lifelong friends through that process, but also it was a very tough time. I learned a lot about the industry.”
When he went back to live comedy he found, for the first time, he could make a living. “It felt like I was following in the footsteps of people like Ronnie Chang and Matt Okine, who had insane growth at the festivals,” he says. It was a heady couple of years of selling out shows and racking up TV credits.
It’s telling that no sooner had he hit his stride, Chen started to feel uneasy. “When I went on stage, people were already laughing – so you’re like, I don’t know if I’m actually good, or these people just know who I am,” he says. “It became existential: where do I go from here? I became scared of the idea of staying in Australia and being at that level.”
Aaron Chen with his wife, Esther Shim, at the Aacta awards in 2025. Photograph: Dan Peled/Getty Images for AFI
Landing the role of George in Fisk in 2019, followed by the pandemic in 2020, kept him in place – for a time. “I became community-minded and I was into gardening, and I liked that lifestyle,” he says. He got married. But when his wife, Esther, asked if he’d live overseas, he realised he wanted to try his hand at New York’s comedy scene.
“It felt like starting from the middle, when I first got here,” he says. “People still had to get to know me, but it was kind of a sped-up process, because I had been doing comedy for so long. And then I started touring in America, which was really fun and interesting.”
He regularly performs at New York’s hallowed Comedy Cellar, doing three or four shows a night to a mix of locals and tourists. “Most of the time it will go well, sometimes it doesn’t. It feels like a very honest audience,” he says.
Currently he is embracing a “settled period”, writing new material and starting to develop his next live show. Hollywood movies and Netflix specials aside, he is remarkably grounded.
“The rewards of these things – it’s obviously amazing,” he says. “But I’m easily overwhelmed. I’m a low-capacity type of guy.”