Concessions

Charlyne Yi is this sort of baby koala of a person who makes comedy
in Los Angeles. Or she might be more like that owl with the graduation
cap who teaches you things, minus the graduation cap and the
condescending fucking attitude. (She’s quite owly.) And also, she
doesn’t really do comedy as such. She just does, like, weird
nothings and calls them comedy, and then they become comedy because
she calls them that. They are great.

Yi—who is small, dimpled, Asian, and young—deals in
awkward pauses and interruptive murmurs: Her standup is pan-deadeningly
deadpan; her YouTube offerings include an SNL “audition tape” (“My
first impression is of the older brother from Everybody Loves
Raymond…”) and “Man on the Street,” in which Yi (not a man),
microphone in hand, eagerly runs up to passersby but doesn’t ask a
question or say anything, and the people either run away or just sort
of look confused, because they DO NOT KNOW WHAT TO DO, and Yi
giggles and looks excited and then does it again. See? Not comedy,
exactly. Just a perfect, gleeful distillation of awkwardness.

Now, Yi has made a movie. In Paper Heart, she claims to not
believe in love—at least, she herself has never felt it, and
worries that she might never feel it, and, on top of that, worries that
she kind of doesn’t care that she might never feel it. The
film—which is half documentary, half narrative fiction, with also
some puppets—follows shy, goofy, tomboyish Yi around the country
as she tries to get to the bottom of this whole messy love
business.

She visits high-school sweethearts who are now kindly old prunes,
still as smitten as ever, and a lonely Nashville divorcée who’s
done with love because “I don’t want to go through the hurt again.” She
talks to professors about the biology of love (“Do you think some
people could be born without those chemicals?”). She grills a romance
novelist, a Vegas chapel’s in-house Elvis, a family-court judge, a
bullshit psychic, and her friends (a comedy nerd’s boner buffet: Seth
Rogen, Demetri Martin, Paul Rust, blah blah blah). She asks children
for dating advice: “You need to take somebody to Applebee’s and buy
them hot wings.” She gets nowhere, really—because love is
squirrelly and subjective, and the only love she really gets to the
bottom of is her own.

In the fictional subplot, which eventually devours the movie, Yi
meets Michael Cera (as “Michael Cera”—his darling, stammering
little self) at a party, and the two hit it off. Yi begins to delve
into her own feelings of becoming part of a unit (or worse, a sidekick)
instead of wholly herself: “No one ever remembers the girlfriend.”
Paper Heart is so cute (one might ALMOST say “cutesy”) you
keep expecting to barf. But you don’t, because it’s so sincere, and
sincerity is like anti-barf medicine. So it’s like barfing and not
barfing all at once. You know, kind of like love.