Artist Profile: Claire Yoo '23 Has Fun and Makes Fun

“I want to drive monster trucks,” Claire K. Yoo ’23 said, joking about her plans for the future. “I want to wear really big boots. I want to go undercover.”

It’s hardly a surprise that Yoo brought up monster trucks in conversation with The Harvard Crimson. Humor and levity come naturally to Yoo: Her introspective reflections on comedy and the arts were interspersed with tangential digressions and hilarious sidebars.

Yoo is a familiar face in the comedy scene on Harvard’s campus: She is the president of the Immediate Gratification Players, Harvard’s long-form improvisational comedy troupe, as well as the head writer of SKETCH, Harvard’s sketch comedy group. Her comedic resume is impressive — Yoo is experienced in both improv and stand-up comedy, and has performed around the country in open mics.

But drawing on childhood memories, Yoo said she wasn’t meant to be a performer. When she was five or six, she auditioned for “The Wizard of Oz,” a musical.

“I thought I killed it, and then I got cast as Apple Tree Number Two,” she said. “All my friends got Dorothy and whatever, and I was Apple Tree Number Two. I had no lines, but I remember I was terrified to be on the stage.”

Yoo grew up wanting to stay at the back of every performance: She suffered from stage fright. She came to college with no previous experience in comedy, but she was inspired to audition after seeing an IGP show in her freshman year. At first, she thought that she bombed her second callback — but she got in, and the rest is history.

Yoo stumbled into stand-up in the same way, attending a Harvard College Stand-up Comic Society meeting after a friend invited her.

“And next thing you know, a year later, I’m co-president with my best friend,” she said.

For Yoo, improv and stand-up are just experiences that made her happy, and experiences that she never had the chance to explore before college.

“An amazing thing about college is that you leave everyone that you used to know behind, so you can kind of be who you’ve wanted to be your entire life,” Yoo said. “And I think my entire life I have wanted to be fun and funny, but I guess I was scared to be. And then in college, I was like, who cares? I want to have fun. And I want to make jokes. I want to laugh really hard.”

Like most comedians, Yoo thinks hard about how to make people laugh, and how to make jokes that are funny, but she explained that it’s also about finding the joy and humor in everything, even outside of her performance.

“I think the point of art is to have fun and to make fun,” she said.

But ultimately, comedy is about telling a story, something that Yoo explored in other art forms as well: She is taking a photography class for her secondary in Art, Film and Visual Studies, and a creative writing workshop focused on writing about one’s past self..

“Something that I’ve been interested in is the idea of nostalgia,” Yoo said.

Perhaps this interest is why her comedy tends to be about finding the humor in her own memories. Yoo describes herself as “more of a personal story stand-up comedian,” but is cognizant of how this brand of comedy comes with its own considerations. When she first began writing stand-up, she was worried about misrepresenting the truth and inadvertently painting friends and family in a negative light.

“Over time, you have to let that go,” she said. “Because memory is so imperfect.”

Beyond the art itself, however, the community that Yoo has found through comedy is another reason she remains involved in it. One of Yoo’s favorite memories is driving to Pennsylvania with the IGP to perform.

“We drive eight hours each way to perform for 20 minutes,” she said. “And so [the performance] is not the focus at all. It's more about the road trip.”

The community she found through comedy on Harvard’s campus is one that unsurprisingly loves to laugh, and comes together from all walks of life and different backgrounds for the “sole purpose of making people laugh.”

This instinct for community and connection is seen in Yoo’s goals with her own art. As a comedian, she takes inspiration from her life for stories to share, and often the ones that end up in the performance are embarrassing. But she sees it as a way for her to process her experiences, and hopefully for other people to feel seen, as well.

“It’s kind of nice to heal in that way,” she said. “And maybe other people will resonate with it, and be like, I did that embarrassing thing, too.”

“I think that’s what comedy is about, not feeling so alone.”

Ultimately, Yoo just wants to have fun.

“For improv, we’re not supposed to break, which means we’re not supposed to smile on stage, or laugh at other people’s jokes,” she explained. “But on the sidelines, I’m always laughing, because it’s just so fun. It’s so fun to do comedy, and to do something that makes people happy.”

And in an academic setting like Harvard, such a simple notion — that laughter is happiness, and happiness is important — is refreshingly healing.

—Staff writer Angelina X. Ng can be reached at angelina.ng@thecrimson.com.