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Actor, writer, and comedian Joel Kim Booster currently stars in the third season of Apple TV+’s show Loot, has released a comedy special with Netflix, and received two Emmy nominations for his film Fire Island. But he still hasn’t quite made it in the way that a certain high profile pet has. “I remember my first Delta One flight cross country, and I mostly remember it because Amanda Seyfried was on the flight, and she had a golden retriever that also got its own seat,” he says of his first time flying in a class other than economy. “I remember thinking like, ‘Wow, that dog has probably flown first class more than I have.’ And probably still has!”
Booster, who’s in the final weeks of planning his New Year’s Eve wedding in San Francisco, chatted with Condé Nast Traveler about his bachelor party and honeymoon plans, as well as the the glories of Mexico City, audiences of New York, and landscapes of South Korea’s Jeju Island.
His priorities when planning a vacation:
For me, a vacation is not doing anything. I’m about to go on my bachelor party to New Orleans, and they’ve planned a full slate of activities throughout the weekend. And that’s fine, actually, I’m really excited about that! But for me, if I’m planning the vacation, it’s going to be about proximity to the beach, what books I am reading, and leaving me alone for eight hours while I bake in the sun.
How he spends his flight time:
It’s either one of two extremes: very active or very inactive. I do most of my writing on planes, especially in periods when I’m touring or flying a lot. It’s the one place that I can seem to focus the best. I don’t buy wifi, so I don’t have access to my phone. I wrote most of Fire Island on a plane to Tokyo, actually, so I associate flying with getting a lot of work done. Or the other way I travel is I’ve popped two edibles and I’m watching whatever I’ve downloaded on my iPad.
A city where he loves stopping on comedy tours:
New York is the best city in the world to do standup, because of the audiences. There’s so much comedy that’s accessible in New York, and you’re seeing some amazing comics for free or very cheap, so the audiences in New York just tend to be more comedy-literate than anywhere else in the world. As a standup, that’s really fun because we’re always trying to stay ahead of whatever the first-thought punchline is. If anyone on the internet could make that obvious joke, then I don’t want to be making it. But sometimes when you’re performing for audiences that haven’t seen a lot of comedy—they’re not even thinking about the first-thought punchline—so if you’re trying to go to 2.0, you’ve just lost your audience. They don’t even know what the obvious punchline is, much less the heightened punchline. That’s never really a problem in New York. It’s a lot of fun to be able to do some more advanced, more alternative, or more complicated stuff in New York.
