Tanael Joachim holds the kind of enviable, disarming charm that allows him to shift from insights on religion, immigration, and communication, to explicitly disgusting one-liners. But that’s not his bread and butter. Rather, like most great standups, his jokes keep audiences off-kilter by navigating topics of intellectual interest. Of course, when we all least expect it, he’ll drop a filthy zinger about having sex with someone’s grandmother. It’s a style similar to shared giggles from kids exposed to an elderly relative dropping f-bombs in mixed company.
Speaking of mixed company, Joachim, who grew up in Haiti, knows how to unite a room as he dissects it. Having struggled as an immigrant in the U.S., his retelling about informing the government that he does standup for a living makes for some uproariously good lines—ones that feel relevant in this particularly catastrophic atmosphere of our country.
In his 2023 “Alien of Ordinary Ability” special, he cuts into what he perceives as the incongruity of Black Christians having earned no less strife after centuries of piety; his controversial train of thought ends with suggesting they give Buddha a try. Joachim opines that he’s losing some of his Black crowd for sure, then pulls everyone back with a smile and a subject shift.
A bilingual speaker, his views on colonization and language are both inventive and hilarious. He considers animal communication and questions if their interactions mirror humanity’s. The set-up? A Kentucky-bred horse inexplicably visits China. Joachim imitates the native Chinese horse in a way that in any other context would feel very bad. The subject matter (language), the characters (horses) soften the blow to a goofy love tap made more ridiculous when he suggests the joke is written for kids.
Adult themes prevail, however. He tells the audience that his “immigrant name” is hard to pronounce—especially for liberal white people who he lets flounder over it in a bit that should really resonate in Charlottesville: “I use my initials, TJ, just to make it easy for people. But my real name is Thomas Jefferson, so I use that just to try to help people out. I don’t look like a Thomas Jefferson. Maybe one of his kids, you know what I mean? This joke is how I find out who went to college in the audience.
