Corinna Yee's Me, Myselves, and I
Do you have an alter ego, a secret identity, a Jekyll to your Hyde? Ok, hopefully not the last one. Corinna Yee is no stranger to being written off as serious and unfunny upon first glance, thanks to her round glasses and ironed button-down shirts. But give her a microphone, and the standup comic comes alive. Join her every other week as she unearths the alternate personalities of everyday people, from teachers to therapists. We’ll chat, learn, and laugh about how shapeshifting between different personas can keep us grounded in a world of uncertainty. Follow Corinna Yee on Instagram @corinnayeet to stay up to date on all the latest episodes!
Corinna Yee's Me, Myselves, and I
The Catholic Code-Switcher
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Corinna chats with her grad school friend, Naomi, about everything from Beyoncé to inner conflicts about racial identity. Naomi is a confident shapeshifter, having attended a diverse Catholic school, to living in London, to completing a thesis about under-reported conflicts in Africa. Hear how Corinna and Naomi's early religious schooling set them up for a friendship built on intersectionality and binge eating.
Follow @corinnayeet on Instagram for more laughs!
Your secret is not safe with me, myself, and I, the podcast where we uncover your alter egos. A book is Gen Zier by day and a sarcastic stand-up comic by night. I cornyi am no stranger to embodying a character if it means I can make vulnerable confessions about my life. I mean, I'd do anything for a laugh. But here, your hidden personalities take center stage as we get to know the real use. Discover how we can stay true to ourselves with help from our different selves. So who better to showcase than someone who is no stranger to making sure every voice is heard? Today's guest started off in film telling fictional stories to now being a journalist who is literally gonna save this world. And I have had the pleasure of being in the same graduate school cohort as my guest since January of 2025. We've shared many an existential crisis together, but don't let that fool you. She is smart, capable, and fierce, and she's here to talk about her personalities and the ones that she's had to begrudgingly work with over the years, some of whom I've also had to work with. Naomi Tiggs, welcome. How are you?
SPEAKER_00Thank you. I feel honored to be called smart, capable, and fierce. I love that. I am doing good.
SPEAKER_01You and I know each other from grad school, and uh we were talking a lot throughout the semester that we had a very busy semester and we were like very burnt out by the end of it. And now that we're out for summer, um, have you slipped into summer mode pretty easily?
SPEAKER_00I feel like my default setting is seconds away from a crash out, but this summer I'm really trying to prioritize like chilling out and relaxing. So I have just been acting like a geriatric woman and just doing nothing but taking walks and watching like daytime television and chilling out. Well, that's not true. I also started an internship and work, but the first two weeks of summer was definitely I was on like my 75-year-old woman vibe.
SPEAKER_01Is intern Naomi very different from student Naomi?
SPEAKER_00I feel like intern Naomi. I'm trying to be more like, I don't know, like the office social butterfly here as opposed to school where I'm just like, I'm I'm here to get this degree. But either way, I like to tune into like a celebrity that I look up to that I always try and tune into whenever I'm doing like schoolwork or intern work is Beyoncé. I've just been watching like a bunch of her like tour documentaries and like behind the scenes and music videos and stuff, and trying to cultivate that type of energy of just I'm a diva no matter where I go. I'm a professional.
SPEAKER_01Do you walk into the office like singing partition and you're like, move aside, everybody?
SPEAKER_00I feel like I'm just like playing like songs from Sasha Fierce's album as I'm walking to the office. And then by the time I get in there, like I just have the diva everybody mad dance break playing in my head from Coachella. So I'm just like, nah, I'm about to kill it every day. That's how I try and walk in.
SPEAKER_01Do you have a clock in song and then a clock out song?
SPEAKER_00Do you know what I have been doing recently? I've this is so random, but I've just been listening to jazz sometimes, like right before I work and during work. And then when I clock out, I like to listen to like a little bit of a more of a smoother RB type feel.
SPEAKER_01What kind of jazz are you listening to? You're not listening to like Glenn Miller where it's like or are you or are you doing that and you're just like pretending you're like, yeah, like you're actually a 70-year-old woman.
SPEAKER_00No, I've been listening to like that Gen Z like jazz, and I sound like a 70-year-old woman just by saying that, but I listened to like the Gen Z like jazz slash hip-hop slash, I don't even know, lo-fi, like the type of stuff you hear on TikTok. Before I deleted the app, I was such a follower. I would just like get all my music recommendations from that app.
SPEAKER_01Yeah, jazz where you're supposed to be like improvisational and kind of like free-flowing. You're like, okay, TikTok, where they mandate that songs have a certain BPM in order for them to go viral. You and I are in a mass communication program together, and um, that's kind of like a mix of journalism and PR, I would say, right? Mm-hmm. We especially bonded, I think, in a lot of our seminars, which required a lot of applying social theories to the type of media that we were consuming. And it kind of like ruins the way that we consume media, especially social media. And you were doing a lot of presentations on like, oh, this is how life lifestyle influencers are, you know, manipulating the public. So yeah, this is this is what grad school has turned us into. Like, we think too much, we we overthink. And yeah, you just like see, you know, me and Naomi like walking down the street, and you're like, okay, like two normal girls having a gabin' a gobble. And it's like really in our spare time, we send each other Instagram reels where it's like, you are a victim of the ideological state apparatus.
SPEAKER_00Literally. Shout out to Dr. Sahar, because everything connects back to her lectures.
SPEAKER_01Because before we ruined our brains by uh becoming too smart, you spent some time abroad in London where you were uh majoring in film. And so you went to undergrad in London and then you actually worked as a filmmaker in London for a little bit. So um, can you tell me about uh what it was like to live uh across the pond as an American?
SPEAKER_00Living in London was like actually probably one of the best things I could have done for myself just in terms of growing, because in high school I was that girl who was like, I'm just here to get my degree and peace out. Like, I do not care that much. And like I missed out on like all the fun, carefree moments of my youth. But like living over in London, I had like a summer. It was my last summer, and I was like, I'm gonna go out like a baddie in London. Like, I was like going out to all the clubs, wearing nothing but pretty little thing, looking a mess. And yeah, it was a fun moment in my life.
SPEAKER_01What did you expect London to be? And then once you got there, like, did it live up to your vision of it?
SPEAKER_00I used to be a directioner, so I always saw like London in the One Direction videos and like their documentaries and their like interviews and stuff like that. And I always wanted to like go to London because I don't know, I thought that I would just get off the plane and meet Harry Styles, but it definitely did live up to the expectations and the sense of like, oh, okay, some of this stuff is a lot more fancier than we have in the States. And in other ways, like I realized that London is kind of like there's parts where it is like the United States. The cities are like cities that I've grown up in. There's this one part of London called Brixton where everybody was making it to seem like, oh my gosh, this is the hood. You get off the train and you're gonna get stabbed, you're gonna be fighting for your life. And I went there and I was like, this is like Oakland. Like what? I definitely for the longest until I moved there, thought that black was something that was just like a monolith. And moving over there and seeing like so many people from like the Caribbean and actually like first-generation African immigrants, I was so like my mind was completely opened over there. I always felt like I was proud of being black and proud of being African American. When I was there though, it really, really like pushed me to be even more like vocal about it. I had some people tell me that black Americans, we don't have culture. So I had to really be like, no, like this is our music, this is where it comes from, this is the food that we have, this is like our traditions that we have on certain holidays. So it definitely like strengthened my identity as a black American woman. Like I said, like I thought that being black was almost like a monolith at times. I thought anybody who wasn't born in like a Caribbean and African country, they were just automatically listening to hip hop and RB. And you know, like we had the same favorite celebrities and stuff like that. And I realized that it's different for everybody, I should say.
SPEAKER_01Again, this is how boring we are. We'll we'll grab beers and then we just talk about like our own struggles with like identity and like race and stuff like that. Because I've experienced the same thing where even like moving from the East Coast to California, just seeing how different the Asian community is out here, because tell this joke on stage, but it's like they have underachieving Asians out here. Like, that's weird. Like there's so much more diversity in the Asian community. But it's like, yeah, it is interesting because it's like I didn't grow up in like an Asian neighborhood, but then out here there are people who have Chinese accents, even though they were born in the US. Whatever they're trying to portray as negative because I'm quote unquote too American, and it's like no, I had the privilege of growing up in a community where I was exposed to a lot of different cultures that weren't just Chinese. And it's like the reason why I live in a community like that is because this is very privileged, but both of my parents have higher degrees, and they got those degrees in the US, so they're English is you know, like my dad was born in the US, but like my mom, she speaks English very fluently, and so she didn't have to just stick to a community where everyone else spoke Chinese, and it's like there was nothing wrong, but it's like you shouldn't be shaming me just because I have the opportunities to engage with different communities. I think another thing that you and I have in common is that you went to a Catholic school growing up, and you I think we're like one of the only like black people in that school, and I went to a Jewish day school and I was like the only Asian person in it. I think I was too young at that time to know that I that things were different. But so I was like, oh, I thought everyone is like from this Jewish day school goes home and eats pork dumplings, and then on Sundays, like when they would talk about going to Sunday school, it's like no, they were going to Jewish religious school, but I was going to Chinese school with a bunch of other Chinese kids. So I'm like, I'm wondering, were you aware that you were kind of having a different home life than a lot of these other kids?
SPEAKER_00My school was actually interesting, the Catholic school that I went to. I went there for elementary and middle school because the area that I live in is so diverse, everybody had like their own kind of cultural things. We were definitely aware that there were differences, but we weren't that deep in it. Something happened, I remember in middle school where I began to start to feel like different from other people. And the big thing for me was like hair because my hair is a different texture than everybody's, and I'm trying to straighten my hair every week to like make it like people so that I fit in more because I don't want to get picked on for my hair, and I got picked on for my hair, and that's when I started to feel like okay, so I'm there is something really different than other people's experiences. Yeah, I can straighten my hair, but I can't like change my skin color and I can't change the fact that I had a different upbringing than some of these people.
SPEAKER_01Did it help being in a religious school that even though you had very different home lives, you were coming together and learning the same rituals and traditions and religious doctrine? Because for me, like when I walk into a Jewish space, people are like, oh, she's someone's girlfriend. But then, you know, I'm like, you know, spitting bars in Hebrew, reading Hebrew better than them, and they're like, oh, okay, she rolls with the tribe.
SPEAKER_00I think that like the fact that we were in a place where there was a lot of conformity with like our religious practices, that's like kind of what led us to be like, we're all the same. If that makes sense. We're all here preparing for our first communion. We're all here in the same white dresses, the same ugly plaid uniforms and stuff like that. You're part of a bigger thing that's larger than race. You know, you're in like a religion that's like 2,000 years old. Girl, we ain't got time to be like separating ourselves from color and stuff like and background and stuff like that.
SPEAKER_01So, bottom line is proselytizing works, guys. We don't care what color you are, you just gotta conform. Shift gears a little bit. Um, I want to talk about your thesis because you and I often go right after each other in class when we're presenting uh where we are in our projects. And I'm always like, oh, I'm talking about comedy and stand-up and social media, and then it cuts to you, and you're talking about a very serious and heavy topic, but it's important. So I was wondering if you could tell me a little bit about it.
SPEAKER_00So agenda setting theory is this communication theory where um they believe that the news and the media influences like what you think about and how you think about something. For me, it ties into African causes because living around so many people who had come from the continent and who had migrated to the UK, a lot of them, including one of my best friends, Sally, shout out to Sally because she helped me with crafting this idea, just talking to her. They'll say, like, there's atrocities that are happening in their home country or where their parents are from. You have people being killed in the Congo for materials that is what makes our phones. You have children dying in mines every day, but it doesn't make our news. And so I really wanted to go deeper into why that happens.
SPEAKER_01Because you're interviewing people who are directly affected by these conflicts. And so I'm wondering, how do you go from being the very fun, bright person, like the bright Naomi Tigs, to having to have very serious and sensitive conversations with people where you know this is very fresh and very real for them?
SPEAKER_00It's hard to turn off the bubbly kind of Naomi attitude and get serious just because I feel like for me, like it's not that I play too much, but like when things are like really sad, I'll try and lighten things up. Sometimes that's not necessary. Like, this is a shit situation. So just let it be a shit situation. I don't need to try and make everything happy and jolly. It's also kind of hard not to be personally affected by what I'm hearing. My friends always say that I'm like a huge empath, and that's a great thing. That's not like a bad thing that I don't want to lose with myself. But I think that sometimes like I might take it too far.
SPEAKER_01Yeah, I think that's like what our program is training us to do is obviously they and they they've talked about how kind of the old style of journalism where you really detach yourself from whatever thing you're reporting on. But then they say nowadays, like especially where transparency, you it's kind of like a paradox because obviously in the news we struggle with transparency and being able to trust our sources in a world where we are inundated with so much news and it's very easy for important topics to be buried or to be underreported. That's why we need to, as reporters, have an emotional connection to whatever story we're telling, is because we have to be able to, for lack of a better term, we need to be able to sell, we need to be able to explain why like something is important and worth paying attention to. And if it's not even important to the reporter, why should you know we devote some of our attention to that? It's time for Corinna's reading corner. What was my read of my guests when I first met them? Do their pages match the cover? Um, so I think I remember I met you like on the first day of classes, and I remember we didn't like formally meet, but you walked over to the classroom and you were holding a smoothie in your hands, and I was like, Okay, it's it's one of these people. And she was already asking the professor about like the drop ad period, and I was like, Okay. But I just do remember you being like so confident, and this is no joke. Well, sometimes when I'm walking with you in the mall, people will literally like stop you and be like, excuse me, are you a model? Blah blah blah. And so, like, I definitely got that sense where I was like, Wow, she is so cool, she's gorgeous. And then I was like, We'll be acquaintances, but you know, I don't I'm I'm not here to make friends, and that was nothing against you. I thought I'm just here to keep my head down and not make friends, and so I was like, wow, she's cool. Cut to a year later, you and I are studying together, we're hanging out, we're like talking shit as classmates. And I've definitely picked up on the fact that, like, yes, you are indeed a very confident and like bad bitch, but then also thankfully, you are as chaotic as me sometimes, where you and I are both just like so frazzled about where our careers are gonna go. But I think that also just speaks to how smart you are and how ambitious you are, because if you didn't care about that stuff, then you wouldn't be frazzled. But I I guess I did not anticipate that you were gonna be such a bad influence on me. Because let me tell you, Naomi, when you and I go, when you and I go on our study sessions, we're like, okay, yeah, we're gonna get lunch and then we're gonna, you know, drink coffee and do our homework. Thankfully, our homework gets done usually. But at the end of the study session, you're like, you wanna get dinner? And I'm like, okay, yeah, we're gonna get dinner. I don't have too much food. We pull up to the restaurant, you're like, yeah, let's do the all you can eat. Some something like three hours later, I dropped $45 and I'm like fighting for my life. I picked up six pounds because I'm like struggling to finish this sushi that you and I over-ordered. So I I did not expect you to be to be doing me dirty like that, but I do appreciate that that I'm enjoying delicious food because of you.
SPEAKER_00That is so spot on to literally how every study session goes. I don't know why, but like I'm very like, I'm a food motivated person. So it's like if I just wrote a three-page essay and locked in for six hours, I'm like, I deserve to now engorge myself on sushi. That's just what I deserve. I know I too am like, oh, it's just gonna be lunch, but I know it's gonna end up being a $50 day. But oh, that was so sweet. I'm I've been trying to feel more like a baddie recently and remind myself who I am. Okay, my first impression of you is like when you were, because you're sitting in front of me, you were like sitting there so proper, you were in your East Coast fashion, buttoned down, slacks, and I was just like, oh my gosh, who is this adjunct professor in this class? Is she the teaching assistant? When you when you're in class, you literally turn it on. We're like, you'll sit up straighter, you'll be like engaged and stuff like that. I could tell you were like, I'm just here to get my degree. And I was like, I respect it with her. I respect that. For context, like I had just moved from London and moved to LA. So I was like trying to find an apartment in that time. And it's kind of hard to showcase good credit when you haven't lived in the country for five years. So that was definitely a struggle. I remember you like asked, Can I give you a ride to your hotel? And I was like, oh my gosh, yes, please, thank you. And I was like, this girl's gonna be my friend. I'm gonna chill with her. I'm gonna make her be my friend. And you started opening up, and then you like said that you did stand up, and I was just like, wait, what? The astute, studious, quiet, she's a she's a stand-up comic. So I definitely did not expect you to be as funny as you are, and that's my bad. I was judging a book by a cover. I did not expect to laugh as much as I have with you. When you would text me when we would do Zoom classes, I would literally be like so scared. I was gonna get caught laughing. First of all, doing this podcast is so amazing for me because in 10 years, when you're hosting the daily show, it's gonna be such cool lore for me to be like, yeah, I knew Corinna Yee back then. Yeah, we were friends. I was on her podcast. I feel like I'm literally like this podcast is gonna be something that people touch on when you're starting to get big. And I'm just gonna be like, I was there at the Hallmark moments. I was there from the beginning. You also are so ambitious. And I just love that through meeting with you, like I said, it's a complete 180 from who I thought. And all honesty, I thought you were gonna do like the PhD route. Nah, you're literally gonna be hosting something on Comedy Central.
SPEAKER_01That first first of all, it's very kind, but people are definitely gonna be like, they're gonna come back to this podcast and they're being like, oh yeah, I can see why the daily show tanks. Like, yeah, if this is who we put on the daily show, if that makes sense. You and I covered a lot of topics today, everything from Beyonce to tackling, you know, racial identity. So it was a very productive conversation. But a couple takeaways, I think, is one to embrace diversity and being able to relate to a lot of different communities. I think that's a very underappreciated superpower in today's world, but it's very much necessary. And I think I want to leave on this. Uh, when I was in college, I lived with five other girls, and we all had different religions, and so we would go to each other's services because we like to get the free food. Like, let's be honest. But on Fridays they would come to Shabbat services, and then on Sundays I would go to the Protestant service and sometimes even mass. But after the Protestant service, the pastor would always say, uh, there's more that unites us in Christ than divides us. And I think that is such the case. Um, you know, the fact that you and I have this deep friendship, despite growing up in um, you know, different parts of the country, we saw that we have a lot of similar experiences and that similarities came from the fact that, you know, we were kind of the odd woman out in the environments that we're growing up in. And so I think that's what made it so that we could have such interesting conversations, is because we have experienced a lot of different lives in this amount of time. So thank you, Naomi, for your friendship and for being here today. Hey, thanks for joining me, myself, and I for a terrific episode. I hope you had as much fun as I did and even made a friend or two. If you want to stay up to date on future episodes and laugh even more, follow me on Instagram at C-O-R-I-N-N-A-Y-E-E-T. Talk to you and your other selves soon.