Twice a week at IUP I have my comedy-themed one-on-one class; last week I watched part of Zhao Benshan’s “I’m Not Out of Money” and today I continued on the same piece because I want to start getting into something like a stand up comedy documentary since learning a bit more about comedy can really help my preformance.
Expressing myself in Chinese about the various aspects of comedy I want to learn from the piece is frustratingly diffuculy, but my ability to explain myself improves daily. Part of the issue is learning the terminology: in Chinese, there is a difference between a 笑话 (xiao hua or joke like a knock-knock joke) and a 包袱 (bao fu, which more closely describes a punch line set up by a preceding shtick).
Some of the comedic issues I ran across showed how I need to continue to improve my fine situational awareness control. This was especially true for the jokes that had Baofus, where there was a buildup before the joke crested. I realized that while watching American comedy I can usually tell when the joke is being built. It’s the comedian’s job to build a joke not too slow and not too fast, until it reaches the peak, where the audience is on the edge of their seat. Then, the baofu (punch line) occurs, either because the comedian has heightened the joke to the point it can no longer be heightened any more, or because he has pulled a sudden and sharp reversal.
In Chinese comedy, I can see now when the joke is being built, but I lack the fine knowledge of knowing how much closer to the zenith the joke is getting. I can easily see the “super-heightened” and the “sharp reversal” punchlines, but sometimes they come earlier than I expect them. As an audience member who might be missing some jokes, perhaps I haven’t been raised as high as the Chinese audience, and therefore, I am still halfway up the joke-mountain when the comedian dives us over the peak.
Like a movie critic, I’m used to not only enjoying a comedy show as an audience member, but also simultaneously breaking down the technique behind the act that makes the comedy work. Watching body language, listening for pace and timing and tone, and keeping an eye on the actors who are not speaking all are keys to understanding why something funny was funny. When I watch a piece three or four times, I reach the point where I understood everything in the language and then spend the third and fourth views looking at these other things.
One lesson I’ve learned from this experience is that I need to work on my mental RAM: the ability to process and understand, in context, many things rapidly and simultaneously. In real life, we don’t get four views of a situation in order to understand it, so if I’m using all my energy to understand the words that are spoken I will miss a lot. Comedy is a great way to stress this observational multitasking skill, and it should help me linguistically as well as with my upcoming performance ambitions.
My slow, subtle improvements are adding up, though, and I haven’t been in China a full month yet. Right now is the time when I get my feet under me for the plunge into full-time comedy work starting in January!