Today, we filmed “Laowai Style” (Foreigner Style), a parody video of the famous Gangnam Style video that has caught fire across the world, China included. Our fourteen hours of shooting, travelling, singing, and dancing was the culmination of a week’s worth of effort wherein I prepared the lyrics, recorded the music, send the sound off […]

On Monday I joined in on a rehearsal of Bilingual Improv Group, or BIG. BIG has improvisers from all over the world, not only from China, but from New Zealand, Hong Kong, the Philippines, and many other nations I’ve not yet been able to pin down accents from. Playing with them has been a blast […]

This past week China Personified, the media start-up for which I’m writing the Comedy beat, published an article I wrote outlining one of the bilingual improv workshops that I attended. You can read the article in full here, and, like a boss, China Personified also has a Chinese version available for those who would rather […]

Last week we had a class activity to go along with our textbook chapter highlighting the Chinese dating show 非诚勿扰 (Fei Cheng Wu Rao; If You’re Not Sincere, Don’t Call On Me). The show, where twenty-four female contestants attempt to out-nitpick each other to choose the man of their dreams, is famous in China for […]

Yesterday I went to eat at a xiabu xiabu restaurant near my home. Xiabu xiabu is a type of hot pot restaurant where there are long counters that wind around the store and each seat has its own hot plate to hold a pot of spicy oil to dip food into. In need of a […]

A few weeks ago I was wandering through the Chinglish-rich shops on NanLouGuXiang when I came across a basket of stuffed dice. The dice had various themes and were used as some sort of truth-or-dare game, where one has to perform the task that appears on the face of the dice. Always wanting to mix […]

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 […]

This afternoon I found myself in a small and sparsely decorated classroom at Beijing Chemical Engineering University. The walls are grey and the windows are dusty. Inside, myself and a half dozen other men and women met and made small talk. The place itself seemed completely unremarkable. Then, a man bounded into the room. Slightly […]

Hi everyone! I wanted to post this video of an improvised stand-up routine I performed last night in Beijing. It’s the first of hopefully many videos of myself doing funnythings. I hope you enjoy! http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=b1QqttAEGXU&feature=youtu.be

For the first four months I’m in China, I’m attending a Chinese training course called IUP (Inter-University Program) designed for graduates and professionals who wish to rapidly improve their Chinese. The State Department generously issued me a grant to improve my language before starting my comedy research in full, for which I’m very thankful, and […]