Actor, writer, and comedian Joel Kim Booster currently stars in the third season of Apple TV+’s show Loot, has released a comedy special with Netflix, and received two Emmy nominations for his film Fire Island. But he still hasn’t quite made it in the way that a certain high profile pet has. “I remember my first Delta One flight cross country, and I mostly remember it because Amanda Seyfried was on the flight, and she had a golden retriever that also got its own seat,” he says of his first time flying in a class other than economy. “I remember thinking like, ‘Wow, that dog has probably flown first class more than I have.’ And probably still has!”
Booster, who’s in the final weeks of planning his New Year’s Eve wedding in San Francisco, chatted with Condé Nast Traveler about his bachelor party and honeymoon plans, as well as the the glories of Mexico City, audiences of New York, and landscapes of South Korea’s Jeju Island.
His priorities when planning a vacation:
For me, a vacation is not doing anything. I'm about to go on my bachelor party to New Orleans, and they've planned a full slate of activities throughout the weekend. And that's fine, actually, I'm really excited about that! But for me, if I'm planning the vacation, it's going to be about proximity to the beach, what books I am reading, and leaving me alone for eight hours while I bake in the sun.
How he spends his flight time:
It's either one of two extremes: very active or very inactive. I do most of my writing on planes, especially in periods when I'm touring or flying a lot. It's the one place that I can seem to focus the best. I don't buy wifi, so I don't have access to my phone. I wrote most of Fire Island on a plane to Tokyo, actually, so I associate flying with getting a lot of work done. Or the other way I travel is I've popped two edibles and I'm watching whatever I've downloaded on my iPad.
A city where he loves stopping on comedy tours:
New York is the best city in the world to do standup, because of the audiences. There's so much comedy that's accessible in New York, and you're seeing some amazing comics for free or very cheap, so the audiences in New York just tend to be more comedy-literate than anywhere else in the world. As a standup, that's really fun because we're always trying to stay ahead of whatever the first-thought punchline is. If anyone on the internet could make that obvious joke, then I don't want to be making it. But sometimes when you're performing for audiences that haven't seen a lot of comedy—they're not even thinking about the first-thought punchline—so if you're trying to go to 2.0, you've just lost your audience. They don't even know what the obvious punchline is, much less the heightened punchline. That's never really a problem in New York. It's a lot of fun to be able to do some more advanced, more alternative, or more complicated stuff in New York.
A hotel detail he cares a lot about:
Not having to use a key card [in the elevator] to get up to my room. I don't know why I find that such a barrier! Or let security send people up to your room with your delivery without having to go down to the lobby. That is the mark of real luxury—when I'm ordering Uber Eats and they send it to my room, and I don't have to go and grab it.
The best vacation he’s ever taken:
Mexico City on New Year's. I think Mexico City is my favorite city in North America. The culture is amazing. The food is incredible. The people are wonderful. The city itself is unlike any other. It's so beautiful how so much of the [greenery] in the downtown areas seems unplanned. It almost looks like a post-apocalyptic landscape in some areas, but it's still bustling. They're so generous with their culture there, and so excited to share it with you. And there's so much to do outside of the city! There's so much about Mexico City that I think is really fantastic.
The place he could travel to a million times and not be sick of it:
San Francisco. Part of it is just that I have a lot of community there: It’s where my partner was living when we met, and where our first date was. I get all the notes that people have about San Francisco, and why this is maybe an out-of-left field answer for some of those people, but I am fascinated by its history. I think it's one of the most beautiful American cities, and a very accessible American city. The public transit there is great. I generally have a lot of nostalgia for a time in San Francisco that I was not even born for. I'm a big history buff. I read Season of The Witch, which is a pop history book of San Francisco from the 1940s to the early 2000s, cover to cover. Even though it's changed exponentially time and time again since the Harvey Milk days, you still feel that history, which is tangible when you visit certain areas. I find that powerful. I really love it.
His travel pet peeve:
Boarding is always a struggle for me to witness, because getting on the plane is a real struggle for a lot of people. It drives me crazy when I'm standing behind someone who has five bags and has ignored the many announcements that you should consolidate into two bags, total. I don't like it when people are rude to gate agents or the flight attendants. I hate getting stuck behind people who don't know how to go through TSA. I realize that not everyone flies as much as I do, but I need you to move. I need you to get through this line fast, and I cannot wait for you to keep going back and forth through the metal detector because you keep forgetting to take stuff off. Everybody should know this by now!
A place he thinks more people should visit:
I historically have not vibed with many of the many major Ohio cities. That state has way too many! But Columbus is such a great town. I had an amazing show there. It's a college town, and I was taken out. I experienced some of the Columbus nightlife, and I had a blast. I really did. I think there's a lot of cool culture and art happening in Columbus, and a lot of really great food, too. People in Columbus are going to be mad at me for letting people know how cool Columbus is! But I think it's massively underrated.
How he’s approaching honeymoon planning:
We will do it, eventually. It's difficult with the nature of my work to plan something very far in advance because oftentimes I'm getting work two weeks before I have to go. We’ve traveled a lot in our relationship, but even when we travel internationally, we’re mostly going to major cities. Which is great, and they’re all different in their own ways! But at the end of the day, a city is a city. If you’ve seen New York, you’ve seen mostly every major city in the world. So for our honeymoon, we want to go to a place like Madrid, where there’s so much going on outside of the city that we can drive to. We went to Seoul last year and I proposed on Jeju island, where I was born. I have no notes for Seoul. Seoul was great. It’s such a beautiful city, incredible shopping and food. But it wasn’t until we got to Jeju, this gorgeous island with so much cultural richness, seeing things we’ve never seen before in our entire lives… We had this realization that yes, we want to see [landscapes] we’ve never seen before, and we can’t do that in most cities. That’s the general framework for our honeymoon, as we have it now.
