Sherry Cola’s stage name originated in a pretty mundane way.
“My legal first name is Sherry,” she told me in a recent interview. “Around 2011, I was making a Yelp account. I was asking my friend Kim from college — I was like: ‘What should my username be for Yelp? I want it to be food related.’ Immediately, after three seconds, she was like, ‘What about Sherry Cola?’ I was like: ‘Oh, that’s catchy. That’s cool. OK.’ So I put that as my Yelp username.”
She never ended up posting any Yelp reviews, but the name stuck. She started using it as her handle on social media and when breaking into stand-up comedy. The first time she performed, “the producer asked me what I wanted on the lineup,” she recalled. “I was like: ‘You know what? Let’s use Sherry Cola.’ Just because it’s fun, it’s bubbly, and when you think about stand-up comedy, people are named Cedric the Entertainer, Lil Rel [Howery] — it’s very nickname-based.”
It also ended up capturing her persona fairly well. “It was never intentional to not use my Chinese last name, but it just works out because ‘Sherry Cola’ really said it all,” she explained. “It’s caffeinated, it wakes you up, it’s sweet — it’s just all of these things.”
Now, her name is on marquees as a star of not one but two movies this summer: the broad and raunchy road trip studio comedy “Joy Ride,” premiering July 7, and the more understated, walking-and-talking indie comedy “Shortcomings,” out Aug. 4.
Though the bar is low and it’s all extremely overdue, the fact that two very different movies featuring a lot of Asian talent — both in front of and behind the camera — can coexist and premiere in the same season does indicate something resembling progress.
“Joy Ride,” in which Cola stars alongside Ashley Park, Stephanie Hsu and Sabrina Wu as a quartet of friends who encounter various shenanigans,…
Read the full article here
