As a comedian, the most important thing to do to work on your comedy is to perform. If the audience laughs, it was funny. If not, back to the drawing board.
But knowing why someone laughs or doesn’t laugh is difficult. It’s even harder when you’re making jokes for someone from another culture.
This is why when Joe Wong forwarded my bilingual crosstalk on his Weibo to his 600,000 fans, he gave me an amazing opportunity. The video shot up to almost 10,000 views, and many of those viewers left comments. For someone like myself, who in a short time has come to know almost all the stand-up comedians in Beijing and perform for almost all the people who are interested in stand-up, reaching a new audience is crucial to helping me understand what people think.
I thought it might be fun to translate some of these comments and provide my own thoughts on what it means for my comedy, and for the potential of bringing together cultures through humor.
“Great! Good job! Your Chinese is so good!”
Probably about 70% of the comments combined some sort of admiration of my Chinese with supportive words. This is great, but also highlights a huge gap when it comes to artists performing in Chinese. There are a number of amazing non-native English speakers who perform, direct, and create content in English, but almost no non-native Chinese speakers that do so in Chinese.
With this being the case, this reaction is quite understandable, although the reality it reflects—that anything even resembling actively participating in Chinese society in Chinese—is a bit sad. Though some of this is foreigners being “held back” by formal or social restrictions on media in China (i.e. censorship, ideas about what topics are “appropriate” for foreigners), the fact is that most foreigners can’t create content in Chinese worthy of being viewed on level with that created by native Chinese speakers. In my mind, it’s still our problem, not theirs.
“Are you a Celtics fan? Rivers? KG?”
Most of the Chinese people that have heard of Boston have heard of it because of the Celtics. Basketball is big here, though the teams with Chinese players and/or Kobe get the most attention. I still use the Celtics to explain where I am from when getting my hair cut. The video was posted before the Celtics traded their best players and their coach, however.
“Sounds like it absorbed some elements from Chinese Xiangsheng.”
The piece at the end was 100% a Xiangsheng piece adapted into the standup style. Moreover, there are probably some more trace elements of Xiangsheng in my performance style, as the only experience I have as a comedian speaking Chinese onstage is as a Xiangsheng performer. Still, the audience-performer dynamic in Xiangsheng is very different in standup than Xiangsheng, so I don’t go onstage trying to be a Xiangsheng artist onstage and do standup.
“Not bad. It’s got some American flavor in it. Not everyone might like it, but I do.”
I’m not sure what this means, exactly. “American flavor” I think is most likely referring to the way I speak, with an accent and perhaps some strange grammar or word choice compared to the way a Chinese person would speak. How I pitch the joke is still apparently not fully Chinese, which shows that I still have a lot of work to go on this front. It was one of my aims to pitch the jokes in a way natural to Chinese people, and it seems that I only partially succeeded.
It is also possible though that the “American flavor” refers to my content, but in my experience Chinese people seeing me perform think language issues first (Chinese is so good! Chinese is understandable! Foreigner can speak Chinese!) before considering content. That being said, I would like to move people’s attention past that obsession into the content phase of things.
“American-style Xiangsheng is pretty conveniently adapted to China. That being said, there needs to be a longer lead-in.”
This is why I love getting comments. This viewer echoes one of the things I have learned about performing comedy to Chinese audiences: the lead-in, or introduction, needs to be longer. When composing a joke I like to be bare-bones about it, but oftentimes this leads me to underestimate the background knowledge I need to express to the Chinese listener in order to get on the same page about things. The audience also tends to be unsure of my own cultural knowledge and therefore not certain if I understand the implications of my own words. The lead-in can help put them at ease on these fronts.
It’s so much fun to be able to interact with people online about my comedy. While China is more international than ever, it is still a country where most Chinese never leave the country and don’t have a close friend who is a foreigner. This means the chance to interact with foreigners online is as interesting for them as it is for me. This gives me hope for my “comedy as cultural communication” message. Maybe all I need to do is be myself!
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