“My close friends knew I was funny, but I was not like a class clown or anything like that,” Jeong says. But by the end of the Mr. Buccaneer show — after the then-16-year-old posed in his swim trunks “like Lou Ferrigno,” performed a heartfelt cover of the Commodores’ “Three Times a Lady” and earned two standing ovations — everyone present on that night in May 1986 knew exactly how funny Ken Jeong was.
Still, nearly two more decades would pass before Jeong, 41, would funnel that comic energy into a full-time career as a film and television actor, most notable for his role as Chow in “The Hangover” and “The Hangover Part II,” which opens Friday, as well as his part as the unstable former Spanish teacher Ben “Senor” Chang on NBC’s “Community.”
First, Jeong would go to med school, become a doctor, moonlight for years in comedy clubs and, later, at a crucial moment in his career, find out that his wife, also a physician, had breast cancer.
“What do you call the guy who graduates last in your class at med school? Doctor,” Jeong says. He laughs, his enjoyment of the old joke still contagious even though he’s talking via telephone from his home in Los Angeles. “You know? It’s a guaranteed, stable profession. And you’re doing good, and you’re helping people. There were so many factors in play at that time that medicine was just more appealing.”
So Jeong stuck with his pre-med studies at Duke University and put acting on the back burner. It was a difficult decision, one that led to some intense discussions with his parents, who wanted a stable profession for their son.
“I promised him that if he got into medical school, I would give him the opportunity to develop his hobby and go anywhere in the world to develop his hobby,” Jeong’s father, retired economics professor D.K. Jeong, told the Greensboro News & Record in 2009.
So Jeong got his MD (specialization: internal medicine) in 1995 at the University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill, then pursued his residency in New Orleans. While there, he won the Big Easy Laff-Off, a contest judged by Budd Friedman, founder of the original Improv comedy club in New York, and former NBC chief Brandon Tartikoff. That landed Jeong the opportunity to perform for two nights at the Improv in Los Angeles, which ultimately led him to establish roots in California.
In Los Angeles, Jeong worked two jobs. During the day, he treated patients at an HMO clinic. At night, he scooped up as many stand-up gigs as he could, for a “lucrative” $10 to $25 a spot. His goal? To somehow parlay all that joke-telling into a career as an actor.
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