Part-Time Comedian
An investment banker by day, Tiger Gao ’17 won’t abandon his stand-up comedy dream any time soon.
BY JANA F. BROWN
Tiger Gao ’17 never planned to become a comedian. Sure, he possessed a sharp sense of humor and the keen observational skills required of those in the business, but it wasn’t until he was named the winner of the annual Hugh Camp Cup public speaking competition as a Third Former at St. Paul’s School that Gao realized he enjoyed being on stage — and being funny.
“In the speech, I made fun of weird school rules and talked about how I was this Chinese student who came in and had all these culture shocks,” explains Gao, who grew up in Beijing. “Suddenly, I went from this Third Former nobody knew to making 500 people laugh. After the show, I remember people telling me, ‘Hey, that was stand-up comedy.’ I started looking at YouTube clips and realized it was.”
It took two more years for Gao to get in front of his peers again, this time with the intention of telling jokes. At the Fifth Form Talent Show in the fall of 2015, Gao nervously referred to notes pulled from the inside pocket of his suit jacket as he stood in front of the entire student body — and many faculty — in Memorial Hall. The reception to his humorous observations about the SPS Student Handbook, the food in the dining hall, and the fact that his jokes might put him in front of the Disciplinary Committee were met with universal laughter.
“That was probably one of the biggest crowds I’ve performed for,” Gao says, noting that for his inaugural performance and for the shows at the School that followed, he had a dean vet his script ahead of delivering his material.
“To be very honest, I love pushing boundaries, but I still wanted to go to college, so I never deviated from my script once it was approved. But the response was amazing and I knew I wanted to continue to do stand-up.”
At SPS, Gao also developed a love of the German language under Jennifer Hornor and an interest in art history under Colin Callahan. While he describes both SPS faculty members as “life-changing mentors,” Gao identifies the now-retired Callahan as one of his comedic inspirations, someone who “inspires me about the way he looks at the world. Mr. Callahan embodies the ideal kind of humor, the perfect blend of boundary-pushing and maturity.”
A few months after his debut in Memorial Hall, Gao found himself in Chicago, attending summer comedy school at Second City, the famed comedy club and improvisational theater that has produced the likes of Stephen Colbert, Tina Fey, and Steve Carell, among many others. He discovered open mic nights during that time, and began his foray into performing in front of strangers.
At Princeton, where Gao majored in economics and minored in German (in addition to finance, statistics and machine learning, and values and public life), he did not have many opportunities to pursue his comedy outside of the occasional impromptu performance, but Gao found another outlet for his interest in connecting with others. He started the Policy Punchline podcast after approaching some of Princeton’s visiting speakers to see if they would agree to on-air interviews with him as the host. To his delight, many of them agreed.
Featured guests on the podcast included scholars, policymakers, business executives, journalists, and entrepreneurs from a variety of fields. In his tenure as the podcast’s host (Policy Punchline has been passed along to other students since Gao’s 2021 graduation), Gao interviewed more than 150 guests, among them former White House Chair of Council of Economic Advisers Austan Goolsbee; former U.S. Secretary of the Navy and Acting Secretary of Defense Richard V. Spencer; Moderna co-founder Robert Langer; and constitutional trial lawyer Robert Barnes, who represented controversial figures Alex Jones and Kyle Rittenhouse, discussing topics from climate change to nuclear weapons to philosophy to financial policy. Under Gao’s leadership, the podcast also featured series on COVID-19, the 2020 election, and “aspiring intellectuals” and published two books of interview transcripts and op-eds.
“At Princeton, there was not that much of a comedy culture, so I didn’t do as much stand-up,” Gao says. “But podcasting is a medium that really brings the most out of you in terms of connecting with people, which goes along with comedy.”
Today, Gao is an investment banker Monday through Friday and an aspiring comedian on the weekends. He is a second- year analyst at Centerview Partners in Manhattan, while continuing to pursue comedy at open mics and at pop-up apartment shows in the city whenever he can. “It’s this great atmosphere where you bring people together on a weekend night after dinner to hear some jokes,” he says.
In total, Gao has performed more than 60 shows at various clubs in Chicago, Washington, D.C., and New York. While stand-up is a part of him that he won’t give up any time soon, Gao has no plans to leave his day job to pursue a career entirely as a comic.
“I can’t see myself not doing comedy,” he says. “But it’s hard for me to see myself as a full-time stand-up comedian because there are other intellectual sides of me that need to be stimulated. I do think the fact that I do comedy means there’s a part of my personality that needs to be fulfilled, one that is constantly wanting to be connecting with people in that way.”