For Desmond Ngai, travelling is laughing matter

Believe it or not, for Desmond Ngai, travelling is laughing matter.

On Instagram, he is known as the TravelComedian with a following of over 71.4K. His feed is filled with hundreds of photos of his vacations from around the world. But he is not just your average travel blogger. He’s much more than that. 

Born and raised in Toronto, Ontario, Ngai is not only an influencer, he is also a comedian. He started his journey as TravelComedian in 2017 with hopes of inspiring tourists to take travelling less seriously. But before we get into all of that, I want to start from the very beginning. 

Growing up, Ngai enjoyed comedy but did not intend to pursue it as a potential career. “I grew up in a household where academics were really pushed hard on me by my parents,” he says. “It shut off my creative side, and so as a kid I always thought I would never be creative enough to get into something like comedy.” 

In 9th grade, Ngai was given the option to drop drama class for computer science. “I was all for it, and I told the teacher that I didn’t want to do drama, that I wasn’t popular enough,” he says. “I remember her telling me that one day I would regret my decision, and at the time I thought she was out of her mind, that she would be happy to have me out of her class.”

Little did he know that 20 years later, it would become his undying passion. In his early years of adulthood, Ngai went on to study law at St. Louis University in Missouri, USA, then completed his undergraduate at University of Toronto. In his final year of law school, he fell in love with improv. “I found that it was a really creative environment for me,” says Ngai. “I met like-minded people who were different from the legal crowd, and I found that it activated the creative juices that remained dormant for most of my life because of my parents.”

Since graduation, Ngai has worked as a lawyer doing Civil Litigation while pursuing comedy as a side hobby. He says he has never felt more free in his life. “When I got into comedy, I felt it to be incredibly freeing knowing that I could finally be myself,” he says. “It’s been an awesome journey so far, and I’ve met many amazing people because of it.”

Ngai was in New York in 2012 when he met one of his favourite actors, Robin Williams. “I really looked up to him as a kid,” he says. “I got to take a photo with him, which was such a star-struck, crazy experience that I’ll never forget.”

Fast forward to 2017, Ngai became TravelComedian. He began posting photos of his trips, a lot of them where he is making funny poses in front of some of the world’s most popular attractions. “I like to poke fun at how seriously people take travelling,” he says. “People are not experiencing the world and the attractions, all they care about is trying to get the best photograph.”

Ngai’s goal with TravelComedian is to inspire people and make them laugh by posting comedic content. “I like to get different shots of myself where lots of tourists are around,” he says. “Last year I was in Kyoto, Japan at a Bamboo forest and if you want a good photo you have to wake up at 4 a.m., and I don’t do that,” he says. “I got there and it was really crowded, so I started taking selfies directly with the bamboo trees, hugging them and doing all kinds of funny stuff, and it’s fun embracing that idiot side of me.”

Ngai says that when people take travel too seriously, it can take away from the experience of the vacation itself. He wants his followers to worry less about looking good for Instagram and let them know that it’s okay to have fun and be silly with posting content. “I like to make fun of myself sometimes while doing it,” he says. “A lot of people don’t like to make fun of themselves because they want to look perfect, they want to look awesome and they want to Photoshop the crap out of their pictures.”

When it comes to having a good social media presence, Ngai says the most important thing is to be authentic, and be yourself. “If you want to create content, focus on being yourself, because we all have imperfections, we all have fears and insecurities,” he says. “If you embrace who you are rather than putting up a fake image, people will gravitate towards that, they will relate to you more and they will respect you.”

Because of COVID-19, Ngai has put his travels on pause to stay at home with his wife. Still, he finds a way to keep producing content for his Instagram. “The biggest challenge for me right now is that I am not able to travel because of the coronavirus, so I’m having to use older photos to post as content,” he says. “When I post, it’s usually a beautiful site or a picture of making a funny pose somewhere and I try to come up with the funniest caption or most creative way to talk about the picture.”

Pre COVID-19, Ngai travelled to many different places around the world, including Italy, France, China, Korea, Las Vegas, and his favourite destination of all, Barcelona. “I love Barcelona because of the culture; also the food is incredible and the architecture is stunning,” he says. “They have a very laid back culture, which makes me want to explore Barcelona and that Spanish culture even more.”

Going forward, Ngai is passionate about pursuing comedy as a second career and wishes to travel more and produce more video content in the years ahead. “My dream is to eventually become a comedy writer, hopefully doing feature films or something with a short film,” he says. “I’m still trying to find my voice as a comedian and I’ve heard that takes a long time, so I’m doing that while practicing law.”

To learn more about Ngai and his journey, follow him on Instagram. 

© Tamara von Estorff, SesayArts Magazine, 2020