Remem­ber­ing John­ny Yune: Hollywood’s for­got­ten Asian star

In 1973, Enter the Drag­on made Bruce Lee the most pop­u­lar Asian actor ever to cross over into Hol­ly­wood. In 1982, a full nine years after Lee’s death, anoth­er Asian per­former final­ly fol­lowed in his foot­steps. It was not Jack­ie Chan, a huge star from Hong Kong whose ear­ly attempts to crack the Amer­i­can mar­ket had fiz­zled out, but instead an actor/​comedian who could be inter­pret­ed as a repu­di­a­tion of every­thing Lee rep­re­sent­ed. He may not have been the break­out star that the Asian dias­po­ra might have want­ed, but John­ny Yune was the one they got.

The sum­mit of Yune’s brief star­dom, They Call Me Bruce?, makes its unlike­ly Blu-ray debut on 24 Octo­ber via Kino Stu­dio Clas­sics. Based pure­ly on anec­do­tal evi­dence, every­one of a cer­tain age vague­ly remem­bers it – the posters fea­tur­ing a car­toon of Yune with crutch­es and the tagline ​‘With a lit­tle prac­tice… any­one can be as good as Bruce Lee!’, the TV com­mer­cials which claimed ​‘He walked like him… he talked like him… he even looked like him!’, and the non­stop air­ings on HBO. It’s the kind of movie that’s so ephemer­al and con­text-based that the Blu-ray should come with annotations.

Yune stars as an Asian cook of unde­ter­mined nation­al­i­ty who every­one insists on call­ing Bruce, though he has none of that famous mar­tial artist’s prowess. He caters to Ital­ian gang­sters, who trick him into trans­port­ing ​“flour” (cocaine) across the coun­try. Shenani­gans ensue from Los Ange­les to New York, and occa­sion­al­ly we get flash­backs to his grand­fa­ther, a typ­i­cal Pai Mei-type also played by Yune.

Aping the rapid-fire Zucker/​Abrahams/​Zucker style, They Call Me Bruce? is a mish­mash of movie par­o­dies (The God­fa­ther, Sat­ur­day Night Fever) and Asian stereo­types (Yune kneads dough with kung-fu and uses nun­chakus as chop­sticks), padded with ref­er­ences to then-cur­rent TV com­mer­cials (“I was once run over by a Toy­ota… Oh, what a feel­ing”). Pri­mar­i­ly it’s a show­case for Yune, who is one of four cred­it­ed writ­ers and whose clunky one-lin­ers most­ly came from his stand-up act. His act­ing is so wood­en and his jokes so bad (“I am a sex object. I always ask women for sex, and they object”) that you may actu­al­ly find your­self occa­sion­al­ly chuckling.

Born in 1936 in a small town­ship in South Korea, Yune trav­elled to the US in 1962 to enroll at Ohio Wes­leyan Uni­ver­si­ty. He stuck around, try­ing his luck as a stand-up come­di­an in New York and even­tu­al­ly becom­ing a cit­i­zen in 1978. Yune was dis­cov­ered in a San­ta Mon­i­ca com­e­dy club by tal­ent scouts from The Tonight Show with John­ny Car­son, and in a time when Carson’s approval could launch a come­di­an overnight, he became America’s most vis­i­ble Asian com­ic. The Tonight Show booked Yune a mind-bog­gling 14 times between 1978 and 1980. Seen today, Yune’s these appear­ances are frag­ments from a van­ished world where Amer­i­can audi­ences were assumed to have lit­tle-to-no knowl­edge of Asian cul­ture, and an Asian come­di­an in Amer­i­ca was assumed to be per­form­ing to an entire­ly white audience.

Yune invari­ably greets the audi­ence with an exag­ger­at­ed ​“her­ro” and tells his lead­en jokes in a dead­pan monot­o­ne. He picks a lot of low-hang­ing Asian fruit: Kore­an fig­ures like Rev­erend Moon (the cult leader who lat­er served time for fraud) and Tong­sun Park (the lob­by­ist accused of brib­ing Con­gress mem­bers to keep troops out of South Korea) are namechecked, and Yune deliv­ers such groan-induc­ing lines as, ​“My friends told me if I talk to my plants, they’ll grow taller and fast. And I’ve been talk­ing to my plants… they turn yel­low.” When Car­son asks he has stud­ied kung-fu, Yune replies, ​“I once stepped in it.” Oth­er jokes could have been cribbed from any dol­lar-store joke book: ​“Lin­coln. I loved Lin­coln. I could wait till I come to this coun­try and dri­ve one.

A 1979 appear­ance saw Yune pro­mot­ing Sergeant TK Yu, a TV movie (pre­sum­ably a failed pilot) about a Kore­an detec­tive. In his inter­view with Car­son, Yune reflect­ed on grow­ing up under an oppres­sive régime: ​“I remem­ber my father said – I’ll nev­er for­get this – ​‘A com­mu­nist is some­one who has noth­ing and is will­ing to share it with you.’” (For the record, it’s North Korea that claims to be com­mu­nist, but 1979 did mark the begin­ning of eight years of mar­tial law for the south.)

At one point, Yune says, ​“In com­mu­nist coun­try, you don’t watch tele­vi­sion because tele­vi­sion watch you,” antic­i­pat­ing Yakov Smirnoff, anoth­er immi­grant come­di­an who appealed to Amer­i­cans by flat­tered their sense of supe­ri­or­i­ty. At the end of the seg­ment, Yune reveals he is an accom­plished singer, and deliv­ers a com­mend­able per­for­mance of ​“O sole mio.” The audi­ence ini­tial­ly laughs, but quick­ly realise it’s not a joke. See­ing this was the only time I ever felt like I was see­ing the real Yune.

They Call Me Bruce opened on 12 Novem­ber, 1982 in a mod­est 165 screens, tak­ing just over $1m from its open­ing week­end. Its $6,493 per-screen aver­age was high­er than the top-grow­ing movie that week, George Romero’s Creepshow. It hung around the­atres for four months, even expand­ing to 324 the­atres in week eight. Its$16.9m gross made it a major suc­cess for its tiny dis­trib­u­tor Film Ven­tures Inter­na­tion­al, an Atlanta-based com­pa­ny best known for releas­ing a Jaws rip-off (The Last Shark) so bla­tant that Uni­ver­sal sued and won.

But Yune’s career was unsus­tain­able: once you saw him, you saw him. The Tonight Show invi­ta­tions dried up, and an in-name-only sequel, 1987’s They Still Call Me Bruce, passed with lit­tle notice. In 1984, Pat Mori­ta – a famil­iar char­ac­ter actor best known for his role on TV’s Hap­py Days – became The Karate Kid’s icon­ic Mr Miya­gi. He par­layed his Acad­e­my Award nom­i­na­tion into a string of Karate Kid sequels and straight-to-video action movies.

In the ​’90s, Jack­ie Chan – who once act­ed along­side Yune in 1981’s The Can­non­ball Run – final­ly hit it big in the States with Rum­ble in the Bronx and Rush Hour. Watch his talk show appear­ances from 1996 and you’ll see him som­er­sault­ing onto Jay Leno’s couch, per­form­ing kung-fu tricks for David Let­ter­man, and gen­er­al­ly play­ing the part of the hap­py-go-lucky Asian. Before Amer­i­ca could ful­ly embrace him, even Jack­ie Chan had to play the role of John­ny Yune.