Going to see Connie Chung talk is like going to a stand-up show where the comic also happens to be a famous journalist.

The more than 200 audience members who filled the GBH Calderwood Studio for “A Conversation with Connie Chung” this March likely had a good idea of who she is: the first Asian American to anchor a broadcast program in the United States. They might have known that she broke into the industry and pushed her way to high-profile positions in a time when very few women worked in journalism, and even fewer were in front of the camera. But what might have been a surprise was finding out how deliciously funny Chung is, dishing out punchlines left and right to bring the room of GBH supporters, members of Asian professional organizations, and lucky ticket-holders to shocked, gleeful laughter.

Renee Inomata, a GBH Trustee and member of the GBH AANHPI Heritage Event Committee, kicked off the event. She recalled a committee meeting where someone dreamily asked if they could possibly get Connie Chung to speak.

“As you can see, dreams do come true,” Inomata said, gesturing around her.

Host Liz Cheng, General Manager for Television at GBH, then introduced Susan Goldberg, GEO of GBH and a veteran journalist, who would be interviewing the 78-year-old Chung about her five-decade news career and her new memoir, Connie. Goldberg and Chung took to the stage as audience members applauded and pulled out their phone cameras.

Chung, dressed in a silky gray blouse and black slacks, was clearly comfortable in front of a crowd. A pearl bracelet and rings sparkled as she waved her hands while telling a story. Her years away from the camera didn’t show, especially during small wardrobe blips. At one point, for example, Chung’s belt unclipped and began to fall, offering an opportunity for one of her quick “quips,” as Goldberg put it.

“I’m not getting undressed. You wouldn’t want to see me take off my clothes or makeup,” Chung said as she clipped the belt back into place. She turned to face the audience, joking, “you want to see something really scary?”

Later, a photo from the congressional impeachment hearings of Pres. Richard Nixon evoked a different emotion. In the black-and-white image, a 28-year-old Connie Chung sits center frame in a crowd of moving suits, almost all belonging to harried looking White men with identical side-part hairstyles. Although there is one Black man and another woman in the photo, it’s Chung’s shock of black hair and her expression that stands out in the circle of men that have parted around her. She doesn’t remember feeling tired or bored during those meetings, Chung said. But in the photo, which she calls “Sea of Men,” she looks totally over being surrounded by these copy and paste figures, ready to take her bag and pearls to any other locale. Onstage, she gleefully recounted how a tweet from journalist Marian Wang brought the image back into public consciousness as an example of #mood.

At the time the photo was taken, though, Chung was trying to emulate her White male colleagues. She practiced walking like them, talking like them, and developed a “potty mouth” as a survival mechanism. She would get to the punchline of a racist or sexist joke before her interlocutor did, and punch a hole in their “delusions of sexual grandeur” to boot. In the book, she directly calls out people who made unwanted advances.

“You name names,” Goldberg commented.

“I did,” Chung replied seriously. “I think there are times when you need to name names. There are other times where it’s a little inappropriate.” Here, she started breaking into cheeky laughter. “But I decided that being appropriate was not what I was going to do.”

On her career as a reporter, Chung recalled the crazy schedule she had at NBC in the mid-1980s, spreading out a few hours of sleep in short bursts so she could anchor a newscast during viewers’ breakfasts, again over dinner, and one last time before bed. “I was driven,” she said earlier. “I was totally driven to be a good reporter.” It was her drive, her desire to bring herself back into public consciousness after several years away from national news, that fueled this cocktail of adrenaline and sleep deprivation.

“I think it’s a Chinese thing,” she said, to be so dedicated to whatever you want to do. It gave her a strong work ethic, but other times the dutifulness she felt as a woman and from her cultural upbringing hindered her career. While working in her dream role at CBS, Chung was also repeatedly assigned to “tawdry” tabloid-style stories. When one story about the rivalry between Olympic hopeful figure skaters Tonya Harding and Nancy Kerrigan aired to record ratings, Chung found herself assigned to more stories she didn’t want to cover.

“I should have been tougher,” Chung said. While acknowledging that she was plenty tough when it came to securing interviews and dealing with colleagues, Chung recalled how she couldn’t say no when the “big boss” asked her to cover stories that other top journalists in the network wouldn’t touch.

In her memoir, Chung calls May 14, 1993, the day she got the news that would be the first female anchor on CBS’s flagship evening newscast, the best day of her professional life. In the two years she held that position, she covered not just feuding figure skaters, but also the Oslo Accords negotiations between Israel and the Palestine Liberation Organization, Pres. Bill Clinton’s foreign travels, and prominent political figures like Republican lawmaker Newt Gingrich. But behind the scenes, her co-anchor Dan Rather was telling her to stick to the teleprompter in the studio and leave the field reporting to him.

“Just like Barbara Walters with Harry Reasoner years before, who despised her, Dan Rather despised me and my presence there,” Chung said.

Two years after she joined as a co-anchor, she was dumped from the Evening News. It was a devastating moment for Chung, who had seen this position as the pinnacle of success for so long, not knowing the tribulations it would bring once she arrived.

What the termination did allow her, though, was the opportunity to start her own family. Chung married Maury Povich in the winter of 1984, and they had been trying to have a child together for several years before deciding to adopt. Two days after getting fired, the adoption came through.

“I decided, this is serendipity,” Chung said. It was the right time for her to take a step back from her career to focus on her other dream of being a mother.

But the night wasn’t all serious. There were plenty of zingers throughout ….

“I know I shouldn’t get political,” Chung said, as they spoke about the Trump administration’s attacks on public media. She then immediately got political.

“You know, Trump is spending so much time, instead of with Melania, with Elon,” deadpanned Chung, “that they’re calling him “Elonia.”

When they changed the subject to Chung’s hardest interview, she dropped her voice to a baritone and shook her finger in imitation of Pres. Nixon as he grilled her about her reporter’s salary, instead of answering her questions about the Watergate scandal.

Speaking on journalist Connie Wang’s New York Times Opinion piece “Generation Connie,” Chung described how flabbergasted she was at finding out that a generation of Asian American women had been named after her. Chung’s father had tasked her with carrying on the family name, and she tried to be the son the family never had. But suddenly here were a congregation of Connie’s, either self-appointed or named by parents who wanted their children to be like the bold, tough, and stylish woman who they saw on the news.

After the New York Times video of Chung meeting the other “Connies” played onscreen, she talked about how she had always written off her husband calling her the “Jackie Robinson of news.”

“Now, I believe him,” she said.

Goldberg ended the talk by asking what Chung thought her father would make of her success.

He would have been proud, she replied, even to have known that she sat on half of Walter Cronkite’s chair. “Even when I was just a reporter, (my parents) were already running around telling everybody, ‘Connie’s on television,’” she said.

Liz Cheng’s parents were among those who thought, If Connie can do it, you can do it.

“She represents all of us,” Cheng said after the event. “She was a force of nature.”