“I grew up watching Xiangsheng,” My friend Tony Chou told me one night as we chatted about comedy in a bar. The night’s open mic had finished, and Tony and I were comparing western standup with traditional Chinese Xiangsheng comedy as people filed out the door and the haze of cigarette smoke finally began to thin out. “The thing is, I can’t stand it now.”
Usually, comfort creates endearment. We love what we know, what we’ve seen before. Therefore, it’s always struck me as strange the sort of love-hate relationship many young Chinese have with xiangsheng, the traditional “crosstalk” performance style of standup comedy. Before the emergence of the Internet in China, if you were a kid and wanted to watch something funny on TV, xiangsheng was almost your only option. Everyone knew the famous performers like Ma Sanli and Hou Baolin (my own xiangsheng master’s master) when they performed on the New Year’s Gala. The image of two men onstage in plain, unadorned robes became synonymous with laughter.
But while many young Chinese have retained their interest in xiangsheng, simply switching their affections to more modern and youth-oriented performers such as Guo Degang, there is also a large section of young people who actively ignore xiangsheng. The reason? It seems old, a relic of a China past.
Tony struggled to express why Xiangsheng felt so wrong to him, so unfunny. “It feels like the performers are trying too hard, performing to me, rather than for me. It’s how things used to be done. Now people want different things.”
Is it “Westernization” that’s hurting Xiangsheng? It’s easy to understand why this might be the case. On the surface, Xiangsheng technique seems only tangentially related to making people laugh. The goal of a Xiangsheng performer is to speak so interestingly that it draws the audience in on the sheer force of their speaking ability alone. Performers learn they should speak kouchi qingchu, zizheng qiangyuan 口齿清楚，字正腔圆, which means “speak with clear diction, with proper wording and wide mouths.” Good xiangsheng performers, like Ma Sanli, are so engaging you don’t even need to speak Chinese to be drawn in. But engagement in and of itself isn’t funny. There needs to be content as well, and here’s where things get tricky.
Whether good or bad, this emphasis on the technique of how to speak rather than the content of what is being spoken does form a disconnect with today’s increasingly content-driven culture. Stand-up jokes are “funny” in that a lot of the material could be read by almost anyone and get laughs. You can hear a sitcom wisecrack, turn around, and tell it to your friend. That’s much harder to do with a Xiangsheng joke.
When I talked to Tony about why he preferred Western comedic styles, at first I thought it was another instance of “westernization”; people in China being interested with the West because it was new and exciting, allowed them to gain social capital by speaking English, and enable them to interact with the world at large. This is a rampant trend in China today, and it’s oftentimes hard to tell why people go to things like Western-style standup comedy in the first place. Is it because they genuinely enjoy the style, or because it is a way to have fun but also get bonus points for being international as well. Most likely, it’s a bit of both.
But the more I thought about it, this simplistic explanation didn’t hold water. There was something deeper going on in this disconnect, and it has to do with time. Not historical time, but the way human beings perceive the passage of time, in a greater sense than just it its hours, minutes, and seconds.
Many young Chinese watch sitcoms like The Big Bang Theory. In the past, Friends was popular, and now there are Chinese sitcoms like Aiqing Gongyu (爱情公寓 Love Apartments) whose comedic style is indistinguishable from Friends. This comedy fits better into sound bites, video clips, and the fast-paced world that young Chinese live in now.
By contrast, Xiangsheng seems to many to be “from the past” because the pace of the performance is so different. My master once griped to me about how television producers don’t understand Xiangsheng. “We would show them a script, and then they would cut the first three minutes because they didn’t see any punch lines. They don’t understand that the opening is vital because the audience learns the characters. Afterwards, everything they say will be funny, because the audience knows the dynamic onstage.”
This is a clear break from the type of comedic media being supported by both broadcast and Internet media. One of the golden rules of viral media is that the content be short, dense, and require little effort on the consumer to engage. Forget three minutes to connect to the audience; the whole piece should be three minutes! Think of Gangnam style, where every two seconds another shocking image rocks the viewer. Our attention spans are becoming shorter and shorter, and time passes faster and faster, like the hands of a broken pocket watch wound too tightly.
I think that ultimately, the thing that young people see as “old” about Xiangsheng is not the traditional robes or the simplistic dynamic of having two people onstage with no props. It’s not even the rehashing of old pieces that have sometimes been performed for over a century. What they see as inconsistent with their lives is the way time exists within a performance. The idea of sitting down at a teahouse, munching on sunflower seeds and drinking tea while the performers go back and forth onstage is a time bubble that brings people out of the rat race of modern China.
Comfort creates endearment: the pace of people my age is more Gangnam style than Xiangsheng style. Notice I say “people my age”, not “Chinese people my age.” This is why the “China wants to be Western, so it ignores Xiangsheng” argument fails: This is bigger than China and the West. Our generation burns rocket fuel all day every day. Every day we read many articles, watch many videos, talk to many friends, send many e-mails. Along the way, we’ve become uncomfortable operating in human rather than electronic timescales. Sitting down with a friend and talking is a break from daily life. Xiangsheng evolved as an art form when talking was not a break from daily life, it was daily life. Indeed, on that timescale, hearing people go back and forth in snappy dialogue was the equivalent of speeding up time.
One of the things I have most enjoyed about my time in China is this access to a slower timescale, which I can access at will. I invite my friends over for tea, which engages our hands and taste buds while letting time slow down a bit, allowing us to chat. When I went home to America, my friends were often confused at how seemingly aggressive I was at trying to get them to come over for tea. The reason? I knew it would allow us to just “hang out”, but in a way where people wouldn’t be sharing videos or checking their phones.
If Chinese like my friend Tony seem to be engaging with Western comedy because it is Western, it needs to be said that this reflects a much deeper trend than curiosity towards engaging the Western world. What we’re seeing here is not cultural imperialism but temporal imperialism, where the time of Western industrial culture is consuming those of other cultures. Not even laughter is immune: Xiangsheng seems slower now than it did before the Internet, though the performers are still skilled and run at high speed. Whether the person who coined the phrase “time is money” was considering China or not, his logic has reached here, and it is changing the way we laugh.
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