Standing up for laughs

Funny thing is, Chinese performing Western-style stand-up are getting guffaws in a society long dominated by traditional comedic cross-talk dialogues, Belle Taylor reports

Mia Li was stark naked the first time she tried her hand at stand-up comedy. The bar remained silent after she told her first joke. Soap has a tendency to do that.

"Other people sing in the shower. I would tell jokes to myself and I would be laughing, 'Ha ha! You're so funny Mia!'"

The 29-year-old doubles over in mock laughter - an exaggerated impersonation of her comic bathing routine.

"For the longest time, I had this joke about me being a reporter. I said: 'I have to go to press conferences wearing a badge on my chest that says 'Press'. And then some people would press. Now I have two choices: Either I can press back - in that case I am a correspondent. Or, I can tell my boss about it - in that case I am a reporter.'"

She giggles.

"I just thought of this in the shower, and I would laugh for 10 minutes."

The problem was, outside the shower, Li had few performance opportunities.

Ever since discovering clips of US comedians online, Li had been an avid stand-up comedy fan, devouring online footage of acerbic, perspicacious comedians like George Carlin, Robin Williams, David Cross, Jon Stewart and Mitch Hedburg.

But Western-style form of comedy had not yet reached Beijing.

Li was stuck telling jokes to the soap.

That was until 2011, in the midst of a particularly bleak Beijing winter.

"I had a group of friends who really liked stand-up, and one day we got really bored," Li explains.

"We were just like: 'What could make us happy? What would cheer us up?' And we were like: 'Oh! We could have a comedy club and we could have a little bar or something, and we would tell some little jokes and that would save us from this depression'."

They approached a local bar and printed posters advertising the gig.

"We had no money so we printed like five copies," Li says.

"We had one outside the bar, one inside the bar, one in the green room for ourselves to admire. I don't know what happened to the other two."

They staged one of Beijing's first grassroots comedy nights.

"I was the only Chinese person. I was the only girl."

"I got the loudest round of applause because I had an element of surprise. No one expects this young Chinese woman to be talking about religion and abortion and newsgathering. I remember riding home and thinking, 'That was the best night of my life'."

Li not only loves making people laugh but also the freedom stand-up gives her to tackle sensitive topics often not discussed in public life.

"There is a saying: 'It's funny because it's true'," Li says.

"I think comedy has an inbuilt integrity because you have to speak the truth because if it's not true, its not funny I like the built-in demand for honesty - not just honesty but brutal honesty - that is just so attractive to me."

Three years after that debut performance, Li is one of Beijing's promising young comedians, regularly taking the stage to entertain audiences with her distinct brand of deadpan humor.

Traditionally, comedy in China has been the domain of xiangsheng, or cross-talk, a folk art with a nearly 200-year history in which two performers engage in a verbal rally of stories and puns.

Stand-up, by comparison, is more relaxed and has a unique appeal.

There is no need to memorize large tracts of material. And there are no hard and fast rules.

A performer stands in front of an audience and tells jokes and makes observations on any topic and in any style. All you need is a microphone, an audience and the courage to get up.

The Hot Cat Club in Fangjia Hutong, Beijing, hosts two stand-up comedy nights a week - an English-language night on Wednesday and Chinese-language on Saturday. And ticketed showcase events, in both English and Chinese, are regularly held throughout the city.

"I feel the more individualized style of comedy suits more Chinese, and this new generation of Chinese people," says Chinese-American comedian Joe Wong.

"It's more personal, and it has a sense of reality to it. With xiangsheng, they usually make up a fake story and talk about that story for 20 minutes and slip in a joke once in a while. So with stand-up comedy you basically go onstage and say: 'How do you feel about these things? How do you feel about this world?' And (you) make that funny. So that's a very different angle."

Wong moved to the United States in 1994 to study chemistry at Rice University in Texas. A promising career as a scientist then began. But in the early 2000s, he gave it up to pursue his true passion - stand-up comedy.

Having never lost his Chinese accent, his act in English played on the US immigrant experience and gained him a strong fan base.

When his filmed address at the Radio and Television Correspondents dinner went viral on Chinese social media, he found himself unexpectedly popular in his homeland.

Since moving to Beijing in July last year to pursue television opportunities, Wong has set about promoting stand-up - this time in his native tongue.

"When I first got here it was really painful every time I had some material I wanted to try out, I had to go to a college to give a lecture. And the students were really enthusiastic. But after a while I was like: 'I can't just do colleges because the students are slightly different than the general public."

That was when he stumbled upon the open-mike night at Hot Cat Club - then a struggling venture. Wong used his star power to promote the club on Sina Weibo, China's micro blog platform, and became a semi-regular fixture at the night.

"The thing is, with stand-up comedy in China - it's strange," he says.

"All the performers have at least a college degree or more. You get PhDs doing comedy, and the audience members are almost the same sometimes, I deliberately go to a xiangsheng club just to trial material on xiangsheng fans."

But Wong says stand-up comedy isn't something only the highly educated can enjoy.

"As long as you have good material - people get it - I think the most common mistake is to underestimate the audience."

Contact the writer at belletaylor@chinadaily.com.cn

(China Daily Africa Weekly 01/24/2014 page24)