Ken Jeong Gets a Star
Actor and “The Masked Singer” panelist Ken Jeong is the newest person to get a star on the Hollywood Walk of Fame. If you’ve walked the real neighborhood of Hollywood, it’s not as glamourous as you might expect. It’s a touristy strip with “Jimmy Kimmel Live!” (not live) shooting at the old Hollywood Masonic Temple, but there’s also a lot of t-shirt shops, dirty bootleg characters charging for photos, and a long-time homeless encampment that LA dismantled in August before a big public event.
The stars of big Hollywood names are often near the classier landmarks, such as the Dolby Theatre or the old Graumann’s Chinese Theatre. Now called the TCL Chinese Theatre, that’s where you’ll find Claudette Colbert, Slash, and Bee Gees. Nat King Cole and Gene Autry are in front of the old-school Musso & Frank Grill. The first time I visited M&F, I saw Keith David (“The Thing,” “The Princess and the Frog”) at a table. The next time, a banquette including Richard Sherman of Disney’s Sherman Brothers songwriting duo and ventriloquist Jay Johnson (“Soap”) asked my friend and I if we would take a photo for them.
Ken Jeong is more a mid-level star so he’s close to the legendary intersection of Hollywood and Vine, but he’s also between a “temporarily closed” weed dispensary and a nightclub with $16 cocktails that spins vinyl records and has a bathroom haunted by Bela Lugosi. All this is preamble for me to show you a video Ken did way back in 2006 as half of Million Dollar Strong, a comedy and music partnership with Mike O’Connell.
In “What’s It Gonna Be?”, Chris is a weirdo hitting on a woman in a bar. Ken is credited as Yoshido, the shiny sidekick with the Michael Jackson moves. It’s done in one continuous take, so if you watch the mirrors, you can catch both of them moving behind the camera to hit their next marks. I first saw the video shortly after it came out and it burrowed into my memory, coming back every few months to still make me snort laugh. If you call cursing “naughty words,” don’t press play.
At one point, MTV announced the two would star in a movie inspired by the video, but that never happened. Ken had already appeared in one-shots on shows such as “Two and a Half Men” and “The Office. He eventually moved onto steady gigs in the “Hangover” movies as well as the sitcoms “Community” and “Dr. Ken.” Mike was a producer on “Dr. Ken,” played several voices on PBS Kids’ “WordGirl,” appeared in multiple episodes of Prime’s “Patriot, and performs stand-up comedy in Los Angeles.