Like many comedians who are identified as part of a minority group (i.e. ethnic/religious communities; LGBTIQ+ ; disabled individuals) Hung Le uses his comedy as a means of subverting the stereotypes assigned to him by the majority population. In Hung Le's case, even being an Asian comedian was a provocation; during the early part of his career, he recalled numerous occasions when those who met him were surprised to discover he was a stand-up comedian; the combination was so unlikely as to be laughable.

In 1997, Hung Le performed at the Melbourne International Comedy Festival Charity Gala. Throughout his act, Le tells jokes that lampoon white Australians preconceptions about Asian Australians, such as the moral panic about the use of monosodium glutamate (MSG) in Asian restaurants. Playing on concurrent anxieties about Vietnamese Australians involvement in the heroin trade, Le assumes the role of a street dealer, offering speed, smack, As, Es, MSGs, HSCs and VCRs for sale. This equation of a flavour-enhancer with hard drugs, not only renders the moral panic ridiculous, but also reveals the latent racism in the campaign against MSG. Instead of condemning the presence of Asian immigrants outright, they are attacked for perpetuating substances that harm the majority.

But Hung Le is an effective enough comedian to recognise the humour of self-depreciation. Throughout his career, Le has lampooned his own inability to live up to the high expectations placed on Asian immigrants in Australia, not just by the white majority, but by their fellow immigrants. He even titled his memoir The Crappiest Refugee as a pun on Anh Dos The Happiest Refugee). Self-depreciation is a ready source of humour, as demonstrated by Les performance: he gets an easy laugh with the joke that his blood type is MSG+. But his subversion of Asians being the model minority also serves as a defiant assertion of Les own individuality, challenging the system that would otherwise define him merely as just another ethnic Australian.