On a recent Friday night, the comedian Misha Han took the stage at the Upright Citizens Brigade theater in the East Village and told the crowded room that Asians love two things. “We love Miyazaki movies and we love not being asked, ‘Where are you really from?’” The audience responded with a handful of knowing hoots and hollers.

Welcome to Asian AF, a monthly showcase for actors, storytellers and comedians of Asian descent that regularly sells out U.C.B. theaters in Los Angeles and New York. The evenings are not the first of their kind, but they are part of a larger quest for representation by a loosely affiliated group of performers who had felt invisible in the comedy ecosystem. Their success has led to spinoff shows around the country as well.

The series is the brainchild of the Los Angeles actor and comic Will Choi, who in 2016 noticed that U.C.B. devoted some evenings to heritage themes, but none involved Asian descent. Around the same time Scarlett Johansson came under fire for starring in the Hollywood adaptation of the Japanese manga “Ghost in the Shell.” Seeing an opportunity, Mr. Choi gathered three Asian-American improv teams for a show at U.C.B. in Los Angeles. It sold out.

Over the next several months, “Scarlett Johansson Presents” resurfaced on the opening nights of Hollywood films accused of whitewashing: “Doctor Strange,” in which Tilda Swinton played a character initially conceived as a mystical elderly Asian man; “Great Wall,” in which Matt Damon took the lead in a tale based in Chinese culture; and finally “Ghost in the Shell.”