The deeper I get into Chinese comedy, the stranger the questions I seek to answer become. Recently, I had a doozy: How do you introduce your comedic bilingual rap song to a perfectionist TV performer with 60 years of traditional Chinese comedy experience? The answer – just do it, and wait for the reaction. Last […]

 Anytime a video with Chinese language or themes goes viral on the Internet, I always get barraged with links by friends on Facebook. But yesterday there was a video about China that was suspiciously absent from this trend. I saw it everywhere online, but nobody was seeking me out to say, “Look at this! America […]

In 2011, I spent a summer working at The Nature Conservancy’s Beijing office as an intern. I was excited to be at an office almost entirely filled with Chinese working professionals, and I was eager to begin using my Chinese in a real-world environment, whether in work or around the water cooler. Working at the […]

The lobby of the Jiangsu Provincial Broadcasting Corporation had a floor of shiny black stone and an atrium that rose up dozens of stories to a high ceiling. Vertical banners with portraits of the famous hosts of the channel’s shows hung all around the room. I eyed each host and their unintelligible signatures, thinking to […]

“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 […]

I’m seldom so glad to say we’ve been here before. It’s been another embarrassing 24 hours for Xinhua, a major Chinese state-run media outlet. Two more stories slipped though the nets into the paper yesterday, and I love when satire and absurd misuse of photos makes it into the official media here. When life gives […]

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One of the funniest things in any culture is someone trying to pretend to be someone they’re not. In America, we have certain archetypes of people who we often make fun of—think hipsters or rednecks—but even funnier is someone who wants to show they are part of a group but isn’t quite fooling anyone. The […]