It’s not every day that you get to Skype a complete stranger to tell them they’re in the New York Times and didn’t know about it, but that’s what I did this afternoon when I called up Jingchen Wu.
Last month I wrote about the NYT article featuring comedy from all over the world, including Xiangsheng, which featured a link to Jingchen and his friend Linquan Ma performing a Xiangsheng piece they had written entitled “Ph.D’s Life.”
The piece caught my attention because it was performed entirely in English—and yet it was unmistakably Xiangsheng, featuring the story-telling style of joking, alongside other stylistic hallmarks such as guankou 贯口, or reciting of long lists for comedic effect.
“It was really, really hard to write Xiangsheng in English,” Jingchen told me over skype after I tracked him down over LinkedIn.
In a sort of strange reversal, I called Jingchen from his hometown of Beijing, while he worked in America following his graduation from the University of Michigan. I was interested in talking to him about his own foray into intercultural comedy. Apparently, he had originally planned to put on a Xiangsheng performance for only the Chinese community. But then he decided that it might be a good idea to broaden the audience, and so pieced together the twenty-minute set to be performed in English for an audience of both Chinese and Americans.
“The jokes that had to do with logic—leading people down one way of thinking and then turning them around again—worked fairly well,” he told me. But it was harder to take jokes he had heard in Chinese and translate them into English. It just came out strange, and he had trouble describing exactly why. For whatever reason, the “something’s wrong” switch kept getting flipped when he told the jokes he’d learned in Chinese in English.
Jingchen also found that some of the baseline content of Xiangsheng didn’t get the same reaction he’d expected when performed in English. In Xiangsheng, there is a point where one of the performers, in the midst of the dialogue, manages to 出格 Chu Ge or “cross the line.” In Chinese, this oftentimes comes in the form of one of the performers insulting the other performer, or the other performer’s family.
Jingchen said it gets laughs in China because it’s something that is horribly inappropriate in China, and culturally taboo. He recalled a joke by the hyper-popular Xiangsheng artist Guo Degang, talking with his partner onstage, Yu Qian. “You may notice that I make a lot of jokes about Yu Qian’s family, but there still needs to be a place to draw the line. Even in Xiangsheng, we have limits to what we can say. For instance, you will notice I never make any jokes about my family.”
But in America, while we don’t go around bashing each other’s family, the iniquity of “Yo Mama” jokes makes this subject not quite as groundbreaking as it might be in Xiangsheng.
And yes, that last paragraph was just an excuse to write the sentence, “the iniquity of ‘Yo Mama’ jokes.”
Jingchen describes himself as a 票友 Piao You, or hobbyist, someone who never formally studied Xiangsheng even in China but found himself performing for fun at university functions and with friends. He also put me on to the “Fu Yun She,” a very jokey-named Xiangsheng society of Ph.D students in Boston who I hope to be in touch with when I go back to my hometown.
In this way, the Xiangsheng community in America sounded a lot to me like the standup community in China. For every person at open mic that has taken a comedy course, there are likely ten that picked up a mic for fun—or were pushed onstage by friends. After all, Confucius once remarked that 知之者不如好之者 好之者不如乐之者， or, “Those with knowledge are not as good as those who are good at what they do; Those who are good at what they do are not as good as those that love what they do.”
Studying Chinese comedy constantly stretches me between two poles. One is my desire to learn about China and absorb and understand their sense of humor. The other is to find a way to make Chinese humor relatable to Americans, and to follow my own sense of humor. In this strained middle ground I have felt myself grow tremendously. The results sometimes are amazing, sometimes bewildering, and sometimes of the sort that only people who straddle between two worlds can truly understand.
3.27.13