Comedy is a delicate concoction, and the comedians know that their audience plays a huge role in the success or failure of a piece. Indeed, in some ways, the audience is the only thing that matters in a performance. But if the audience is full of strangers one night and strangers the next, what’s the difference? Isn’t every audience the same, a blank slate to write your jokes upon?
But when you are the comedian you realize, this is not the case. It can’t be the case.
This is because comedy is about connecting with people on a personal level, and so you, as a comedian, need to find a way to connect with this specific audience, these specific people. Every night you must come to know these strangers, immediately and intimately. You need to look at the faces and be like Sherlock Holmes considering the minutest details of his suspects, only with a microphone in your hands and not a magnifying glass.
Take the table of young twenty-somethings in white shirts with the top buttons all undone. To play to them properly, the comedian must know about the life they lived in their high-level liberal arts college (a glint of gold on a finger suggests Ivy League, perhaps Harvard). Your phrasing and vocabulary, and perhaps even annunciation, all shifts.
The men lean back deeply into the chairs, fingering sweating glasses of craft beer, their shoulders relaxed. This is the relaxing part of their day after grinding reports and doing various big boy work at their big boy job—being professional, after all, is not all it was cracked up to be. They’ve come to have a good time and are intent on getting it whether or not they enjoy your material. They might be apt to heckle. Perhaps looking straight at their table with a joke that is sure to hit early in the set might be in order. Get them involved, in on the joke. On your team, they could buoy the entire set. Without them, the whole performance might bust.
Behind them is a couple in their thirties. She is pretty. He is nervous. They are both dressed up. There are no rings on their fingers; the smell of OK Cupid wafts upwards to the stage. They both want to laugh as well, but he is concerned about looking put-together and she worries that if she laughs too loud he will think she is too wild (and maybe see too much of her teeth, which are a little crooked).
Two glasses of wine sit nearly full in front of them. Each seems worried to drink, lest they seem like a boozehound to the other. That’s a shame—they would enjoy the evening and the show more if they were looser, and the wine would help. But as with the previous table, they want to laugh, and you want to make them laugh. There is room to make this work. Is there a way to change one of the segues between your bits to make note of the good-looking couple in the front? Make their night special? Get them vested in the performance, so that they can see themselves creating a story of a good first date, when they had a witty back-and-forth with the comedian at the comedy club?
Each table at the club is its own self-contained biosphere, a packet of information, which, if parsed properly, will make your every word hilarious, every observation astute. Master comedians have this parsing mechanism so well honed they can enter any room or television studio, take in the entirety of the environment, and immediately absorb this wellspring of information. Then, they just talk—and people listen to every word as if it were gold, because the best comedians understand, and because they understand, they connect. They reach out to the audience, shaping their reactions with the subtle hands of a potter easing the shape of a bowl from a lump of clay. Sometimes it’s hard to say whether the piece of art that emerges was the work of the artist, or the one perfect manifestation of material he worked with. Did the potter make the bowl, or merely reveal it?
This year, I am learning to perform comedy for Chinese audiences. To succeed, I need to connect with them. That is my goal, but how do I get there?
The audience sees a foreigner onstage and begins immediately to do their own analysis, wondering what kind of person stands on a stage ten thousand kilometers from home to speak in accented Chinese to a crowd of onlookers. To connect with them, I need to know the end results of their analysis. What do they think of me?
What kind of a connections are they longing to make? Maybe those that let them learn about the world they perceive me to be from.
What kinds of connections are off-limits? Maybe those that they believe to be the domain only of the culturally Chinese, that no amount of book learning can truly teach.
Meanwhile, my own parsing mechanisms are shot. They were trained for Bostonians, for college kids and baseball games, for Americans and SNL. For Westerners who use phrases such as Achilles heel without the slightest thought of the depth of cultural knowledge it reveals. For native English speakers that can tell read the emotions within the peaks and valleys of our speech, and for whom the two halting cadences of Jack Nicholson and Barack Obama are as different as night and day. For westerners who would never use the word “peasant” outside of a conversation about the middle ages. For westerners who have been exposed to stand-up comedy for more than ten years, and expect a certain type of performance.
My finely wrought lens on American society yields distorted images when I turn my sight on this new culture. The lens was not made to pierce the levels of Chinese social intricacy needed to make comedy. It needs to be replaced with a new lens, one that is made for China, and that means my lens can only ever be as good as my knowledge about every aspect of Chinese culture, personal interaction, and China’s interaction with the West.
It is a balmy summer night in a dark, smoky club in Beijing. Confused faces look up at me when I perform. There is a table of twenty-somethings, the young professionals. They might be from Tsinghua rather than Harvard, equally proud of their school but a world apart in terms of life experience. They know the ghastly experience of taking the Gao Kao college entrance exam with an eye on getting into the country’s top school. They know the headaches they endured trying to learn English from a language tutor who may as well be indistinguishable from me, and seeing their parents fork over massive amounts of money to foreigners my age for their lessons. They know that their attractive job at a bank or investment fund is as much a fetters as it is a release, because after surviving the grueling process to climb to the top of the pyramid, they can never, ever leave that job for fear of forsaking decades of good test scores, and throwing their parents pride at fostering a successful child in the mud.
They know they know these things. They don’t know if I know these things. Even if I were to say I know these things, they might not believe I really know these things. Because the foreigners that Chinese interact with are never comedians. They are the English teachers, the education consultants, the businessmen, the rich boyfriend of their college friend. Even onstage, the assumption is that I know little and understand less. The understanding is absent, and without understanding, there can be no connection. No connection, no comedy.
And so every time I learn a new word, or read an article about the issues faced by Chinese twenty-somethings, and sharpen my lens on Chinese culture, I remind myself that for laughter, merely learning is not enough. To make the Chinese audience understand that I understand, I must tell them how I came to understand. I need to tell the stories of talking with Chinese friends over hot pot, of eight hour bus rides over pothole-infested roads in a van with broken doors and padding falling out of the seats. I must tell stories about writing characters over and over and over again. And then I can tell my joke. After all that work, I’d better hope the joke was funny in the first place.
More often than not, my skill is still insufficient. My jokes bomb, the tables abandon the show, and one by one people turn to talk loudly to one another about this and that.
But there is still hope, because in China, as well as in America, we all want to laugh together. Apparently, we just need to know each other better to do so.