Emil Amok, Lost NPR Host: Married to PETA and other untold tales from an American Filipino Life

“Emil Amok” is like John Leguizamo’s “Latin History for Dummies,” only more uniquely American Filipino.

It’s a live, on-stage, in-the-moment comic storytelling show featuring award-winning journalist Emil Guillermo, a former host of NPR’s “All Things Considered,” who comes to grips with race and ethnicity in a memoir that has delighted critics from coast to coast.

From the Orlando Weekly: “Guillermo shifts his radio-smooth voice into exaggerated accents and mannerisms. If his gong annoys you, if his spectacle at times makes you uncomfortable, if the account of injustices fly at you too fast to even process, that’s the point. Guillermo is at a breaking point with microaggressions and invisibility. He tells us he is like a coconut: “Brown on the outside and shredded on the inside.” He is ready to run amok.

“At first, I had trouble tuning in to Guillermo’s frenetic, disjointed delivery. Was this standup, a monologue, a rant? But as the jokes, personal plotline and historical accounts continued, I settled in and began to enjoy trying to keep pace with Guillermo’s brilliant mind.”

The Manhatten Digest said: “Emil Amok Guillermo has a lot to say, but it’s what is left unsaid that makes his solo show so interesting,” the Manhattan Digest said. “ Emil Amok—Lost NPR Host …runs just under an hour and exposes America’s ugly colonization of the Philippines, along with other comical and often profound observations.”

In this Fresno-premier at the Rogue Festival, Guillermo also talks about life being married to a PETA executive and how that has changed his diet, his sex life, and his need for a colonoscopy.

Emil Guillermo was the first Asian American to host NPR’s “All Things Considered,” in 1989. He has written a column on race, politics and culture from an Asian American perspective since 1995. His collection of essays, “Amok,” won an American Book Award in 2000. He began taking his essays to the stage in 2015 in the form of his “Amok Monologues.” Guillermo has performed at Fringe Festivals in New York, San Diego, Orlando, Baltimore and Washington, DC. He is a student of monologist Mike Daisey. Emil graduated from Harvard despite getting the worst grade the school legally can give a student. In his year, Guillermo won the competition to deliver the funny Ivy Oration as class clown.

In 2023, Emil performed off-Broadway in New York City in Ishmael Reed’s “The Conductor,” where he played a conservative Fox News-style television commentator.

Emil hosts “The PETA Podcast,” and does a secret podcast, “Emil Amok’s Takeout” on YouTube.com/@emilamok1.
See his columns: www.aaldef.org/blog