Near the end of his Netflix special Funny Garden, Aaron Chen checks in with his New York audience. “Did any of you come to the show because you know me from Fisk?” he asks. A chorus of enthusiastic whoops answers. “It changed my life,” he says. It’s a good setup for a joke about how his audience shifted overnight from 90% men aged 25 to 34 (“This is not a good demographic. A lot of incels”) to women aged 45 to 54 (“These beautiful, white angels!”). But, like much of his comedy, there’s a twist of sincerity.
“It did really change my life,” Chen tells me. Fisk, the ABC’s hit sitcom about a beleaguered suburban probate law firm, put Chen – who plays probate clerk come self-styled “webmaster” George – on the map not only in Australia (where he won a Logie in 2025) but also the US, where the series landed on Netflix in August 2023. When Chen moved to the US that very month, he found he already had a small but enthusiastic fanbase. “I was shocked that people in crazy places like Burlington, Vermont, would be coming to shows.”
