InterviewComedian Kim Byung-sun finds laughs beyond language on Mexico's stand-up scene

“Hablo español.”

The words are simple: “I speak Spanish.” But when Kim Byung-sun opens with it before a Mexican audience, the room often laughs before he has delivered a conventional punch line.

Part of the joke is the surprise of seeing a Korean man walk onto a local open-mic stage in Latin America and announce in Spanish that he can speak the language. Part of the joke is his own self-awareness that even by his own account, his Spanish is far from flawless.

“People who majored in Spanish would probably say I cannot speak Spanish well,” Kim said with a laugh during an interview with The Korea Times, Monday. “My grammar is terrible. My vocabulary is a mess. But they cannot ignore me, because they cannot do what I do onstage.”

Known online as Comico, Kim has built a distinctly transnational career through Spanish-language videos and stand-up comedy. Based in Mexico City, he performs for local audiences, tests jokes at open mics and makes online content for his YouTube channel, which has 1 million subscribers.

He is among the very few Koreans — and possibly the only one working at this scale — to perform stand-up in Spanish before local audiences in Latin America. The distinction matters less to Kim, however, than his belief that comedy is a form of communication, and communication is not reserved for people with perfect grammar.

“If you give me three months, I think I can have a free conversation in any language,” he said. “That is not because I am a language genius. It is because I learned that knowing a language and being able to talk and connect to people are different things.”

For Kim, the real currency is not vocabulary lists or grammatical precision. It is about what Koreans call “gisae” — a mixture of nerve, momentum, confidence and the ability to hold one’s ground — along with an instinct for what needs to be said in a particular moment.

“Language is confidence,” he said. “A lot of language teachers say that, and it may be difficult to really understand it. I experienced it. You have to run into people. You have to make mistakes. Once you understand that it is OK to be wrong, you can start communicating.”

From Seoul to Mexico

Kim’s route to Spanish-language stand-up began far from Mexico.

As a child, Kim did not seem like an obvious performer. He disliked presentations so intensely that even being asked to read aloud in class made him anxious.

“I would stutter,” he said. “I thought people were laughing at me.”

After graduating high school, Kim took an extra year to study so he could enter the physical education program at Seoul National University’s College of Education. The experience helped him begin to see things differently.

“It was the first time I had set a goal and achieved it,” he said. “That gave me confidence.”

At university, Kim began to enjoy speaking in public. “People would laugh, and I started thinking, 'Oh, I made them laugh,’" he said. “Nothing about my performance had really changed. The way I interpreted it changed."

After being rejected from the Army Reserve Officers’ Training Corps, Kim learned about a Korea International Cooperation Agency program that allowed volunteers to fulfill their military-service obligation while working overseas. He applied and was assigned to Peru, where he spent about two and a half years as a physical education teacher.

“I did not even know where Peru was or what language people spoke there,” he said. “I was simply thinking, ‘I have to complete my military service.’”

In rural Peru, English was of little use. Kim had to communicate before he felt ready, learning what he calls “survival language” through necessity rather than textbooks.

“That is where I realized that language is a tool,” he said. “Before that, I studied English to get into Seoul National University. Language was an exam. It was something difficult. In Peru, I realized it was there to help me.”

That experience reshaped his view of communication — and later, comedy. A speaker does not need flawless grammar or a vast vocabulary to connect with someone, he noted, as long as they can make their meaning clear.

After returning to Korea, Kim succeeded in joining KBS’s 28th open recruitment for comedians, where he obtained the training he now relies on: repeated exposure to an audience, the ability to keep his composure and the experience of failing in public.

“There are people who are naturally good at controlling a stage. I don’t think I was one of them,” he said. “But the number of times I went onstage in Korea cannot be ignored.”

Kim first tried Spanish-language stand-up in Spain, where he was impressed by performers who could hold an audience for a full hour just by using their own voice and stories. But visa difficulties made it hard to establish himself there long-term.

Mexico offered what he needed most — a stage.

He chose Mexico City not simply as a place to live but as a place where he could perform. Compared to Korea’s still-developing stand-up scene, Mexico offered a more active live-performance culture and audiences that were accustomed to stand-up’s conventions.

The early results were brutal. Kim estimates that more than 90 percent of his first sets in Mexico did not work as he hoped. He says that now, however, it's the other way around.

Along the way, he learned not to let audiences see any anxiety or uncertainty.

“If the audience is cold, you cannot look flustered,” he said. “The moment you show that, you become food.”

Jokes across cultural borders

Kim’s Korean identity is central to his stage persona, but not in the polished, export-ready way often associated with Korean popular culture.

He uses the friction of everyday life, including Mexican assumptions about Asians, Korean assumptions about Mexico and the small absurdities that become visible only when one has spent time away from one's country of origin.

Returning to Korea once a year also gives Kim fresh material. He visits family and eats the foods he misses most, but he also looks at his home country with the sharpened eye of an outsider.

“As a comedian, I deliberately become sensitive to those things,” he said. “I make a note: ‘A foreigner visiting Korea might feel this way.' Everything can become material.”

That openness extends to subjects many performers would avoid, including racial and ethnic stereotypes. During this year's World Cup, Kim turned a widely discussed incident involving a racially charged gesture targeting Asians into material for a Mexican audience.

He said the decision was not driven by a grand desire to exact revenge on behalf of Koreans or a political mission.

“It was funny,” he said. “That was the simple reason. It was timely, and the idea came to me.”

Kim does not believe that comedy must always be a moral lecture, though he does believe it must respond in the room. He said he did not arrive on Mexican stages with a map of every social boundary.

“I do not really have a line,” he said. “I do not know the line because I am not Mexican. So I have to run into it.”

That does not mean he thinks comedians have no responsibilities. He tests his jokes, watches the audience and then seeks feedback from Mexican peers.

“If a room goes quiet, that's the initial signal,” he said. “Then I ask fellow comedians. After that, I try again on another stage.”

Kim’s own experience of being called “chino,” meaning Chinese, in Peru also shaped that perspective. For roughly a year, he interpreted it as mockery. But as he gained more experience, he began asking people what they meant and learned that people simply used “chino” as a broad and imprecise label for any person from East Asia.

When he asked to be called “coreano,” or Korean, most apologized and complied.

“I realized that sometimes I was the one with prejudice,” he said. “When you do not understand the language, you are afraid. I thought they were making fun of me because I did not know what was happening.”

Kim is careful to acknowledge that racism exists and that not every encounter is innocent. Still, he resists treating every clumsy or ignorant remark as proof of malicious intent. The difference, for him, lies in context, reciprocity and what he calls the “feeling” behind a person’s words.

“If I make fun of Mexico, it is because I like Mexico,” he said. “That shows. If I did not like it and just said, 'These Mexicans are like this,’ people would not receive it as humor.”

Life that stays funny

For Kim, the pleasures of comedy is not limited to applause, subscribers or the rare triumph of a set that works perfectly. It is also in how it converts daily irritations into something survivable.

“Comedy is not a job,” he said. “Comedy is an attitude toward life.”

It doesn't always work right away. Kim's family is currently experiencing visa issues, which he said has brought genuine stress as he seeks to live and work legally in the country. He cannot yet turn it into a joke because he is too close to it.

“But after time passes, I may be able to make it into a joke,” he said. “Right now it is a tragedy because it is too close. When there is time and distance, it can become comedy.”

Kim once imagined spending about a decade in Mexico before returning to Korea. Having accomplished many of his goals for life there sooner than expected, he is reconsidering how to frame his time there.

“I want to become someone who lives on Earth,” he said.

That life, he said, will include comedy for as long as he can tell stories. He expects there will be plenty of new material: aging, failure, survival, family, countries changed by time and the oddity of being alive.

“I want to do stand-up comedy for the rest of my life,” he said. “Even when I am old, there will be another story waiting.”