Photo: Gilbert Carrasquillo/GC Images
Joel Kim Booster possesses something increasingly rare in Hollywood: an imperfect set of teeth. Booster is a successful comedian and actor known for being smart and sexually open about his work – and also, most importantly, for being hot. Compared to his perfect, chicken-smoothie- hammered abdominals, teeth distinct. The top row is fairly straight, without the unnatural white tint of a modern Marvel star. the bottom row goes freely. Offline, offstage, and out of LA, they seem normal, but as his fame grows, Booster’s teeth become a point of contention.
It has long been true that, for anyone in Hollywood past a certain threshold of fame, there is increased pressure around physical appearance. A lot of it is subjective: how well shaped your face is, how beautiful your body looks, whether you have the right hair color or style. But teeth are objective. Is it straight or is it crooked? they are white or they are not. Often, celebrities choose to fix their teeth, usually by getting veneers. But not Booster — at least not yet. “I love it when people ask me when I’m going to get my teeth fixed,” the comedian he tweeted on June 19. “Extremely normal behavior. And honestly, if I did, it would make me almost too strong.” In a recent interview, we asked Booster for his deepest thoughts on his own (perfectly good) teeth and how those thoughts have evolved as he continues his mainstream rise. An edited version of the interview follows.
It’s one of the first things people expect you to do when you get money or success or fame: Fix your teeth. is “All-Stars teeth’ up Drag Racewhen queens come back with new teeth: It’s both status and an indicator of financial security to have good teeth.
It was over the weekend that Instagram launched the Q&A feature in Stories. I had already moved to Los Angeles at this point and was returning from a trip to Fire Island. I was at an Airbnb in New York City and I remember the question: Someone asked me straight out, “When you become famousare you going to fix your teeth?’ It was the first time someone measured me because I had bad teeth. At that point in my career, I didn’t necessarily have the wherewithal to deal with it. My answer was simply “No”. And I’ve internalized that response to such an extent over the years since then, as I’ve become more and more successful, that I kind of put off doing any dental work.
Listen, I smoked for seven years. I drink soda every day. My teeth are not as white as they could be. For so long, I didn’t have dental insurance. And even if you have insurance, any work beyond cleaning is very much out of pocket. So I avoided the dentist for a long time from my late 20’s to early 30’s. I saw the dentist maybe once when I was living in Chicago right after college. I’ve seen the dentist maybe ten times in the last ten years, and most of them are recent. Growing up, we were pretty good about going to the dentist regularly, but orthodontics was completely different. My brother and sister both had braces, but until they got to me, I don’t think we could afford them — especially for my teeth, which aren’t all that bad. For us, it was more financial than anything else: He doesn’t really need it. It might become a problem as it gets older, but for now it’s not worth the money to deal with.
I am now left with these fully serrated lower row teeth. My bottom teeth are fucked up. It’s not always on my mind, but being on TV for the last five years or so, I’ve learned from watching myself on screen what I can and can’t do. I specifically speak in a different way so as not to reveal my bottom row of teeth. It’s literally about removing certain faces from my repertoire. The most basic example of this is that I will not: [Contorts face into a disgusted wince that shows his bottom teeth.] I’ll be like: [Keeps mouth shut and looks concerned.] When I speak, I maintain the position of my lower lip as if nodding, slightly hiding my bottom teeth at all times when I speak. It’s not something I’ve spent too much time on. I don’t sit in front of the mirror and practice. But it’s always in the back of my mind.
Comments are getting fewer and fewer as my platform expands. I did a stupid video interview where we were talking about blowjob technique and the comments lit up about “I don’t take blowjob advice from Mileena” a character from Mortal Kombat who has the famous fucking teeth. It is what it is. At this point, all you can really do is laugh, because if you put an insecurity out there, you’re setting yourself up for people to try to make you feel better in a really misguided way.
My tweet I wasn’t fishing for compliments. The whole idea of being hot and focusing on my attractiveness was creatively and comically very interesting five or six years ago, when I think there was less understanding about the politics of Asian male desirability. Plus I was less hot, so there was an element of the public not buying it. I would play with it. Now that I’m more famous and the conversation around Asian men’s desirability has moved on a bit, it’s not an interesting avenue to take comedically.
I have had my teeth whitened. It didn’t help that much. I thought toning would be different than fitness because “how your body looks” is so subjective, but toning is an objective value. Your teeth will be whiter. I thought it would be comforting somehow, but it wasn’t. I always do these things that I think will change the way I feel about myself, and it never does. It’s such a moving target. Getting my teeth to conform to objective standards of “straightness” and “whiteness” is ultimately not something you can hold on to in terms of your self-esteem. Whitening my teeth and spending all that money made me even less inclined to get veneers. This was my thing to do “when I had money”.
Getting veneers is a lateral move, almost. It’s not like you fixed your teeth, you just got veneers. It’s a lose-lose scenario: You get on TV, you have bad teeth, you have some success, then you get veneers, and now people are after you because you have crazy teeth. We want there to be an inherent punishment in the act of making yourself better by cheating: veneers, steroids, plastic surgery. With all these things, there is an undercurrent of people like, Yes, but you got there because you cheated or because you had money or because you had accessetc.
Maybe I’ll get veneers someday. I mean, my teeth are decaying from the amount of soda I drink. But the reason to keep your teeth, to me, is that it keeps one foot in and out of the system we’ve created. A little piece of me says, No, I reject these standards of beauty and will live strong with my bad teeth — which aren’t that bad by the way. This is the mind trick: I’m above beauty standards and this game we’ve all set the rules for ourselves. Either way, it’s all a bit of theater.
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