How Does the Chinese Government Make Funny
Can China Take a Joke?
Stand-up comedy is catching on in the country, even if people still aren't quite sure when to laugh.
'Three, two, one, applause!" The audience in the Beijing studio cheered as excitedly as anyone could be expected to cheer for an empty stage. They had gathered on a January evening last year for a taping of "Is It True?" — a show broadcast on the Chinese state-run network CCTV2 and hosted by the comedian Joe Wong. Before Wong came out to tell jokes, the director, an energetic young man in white-framed glasses and a puffy vest, wanted to record the audience members' reaction. "Don't be too quiet," he advised them. "This is a lively program."
A few minutes later, the lights flashed. "Everyone please give a warm welcome to Joe Wong!" the announcer shouted. The opening bars of Van Halen's "Jump" played. Wong came running in through a door behind the audience, gave the camera "rock on" fingers and a Gene Simmons tongue wag and bounded onstage. His aggressively unfashionable haircut and glasses, combined with his red dress shirt and gold bow tie, made him look like a very old child. (He is 45.)
"Hello, everybody, I'm Huang Xi," he said, using his Chinese name, then added a pun: "Huang like a cucumber, Xi like a watermelon." Mild chuckles. Glissando sound effect. "That wasn't a joke," he said.
Wong then launched into 10 minutes of American-style stand-up comedy with distinctly Chinese punch lines. A man was arrested for robbing a bank using pepper spray, he said. "It worked twice. The third time, they caught him because the police were from Hunan." (Hunanese food is spicy.) "They say that to get married these days, you need a house and a car. But when my wife and I got married, we didn't have a house or a car — and I still didn't dump her." (In China, men are expected to provide.) The jokes were punctuated with sound effects: the boyoyoing of a spring, the tinkle of a piano.
The show segued into the main act, in which Wong and his co-host, Jessica Chen, a tall woman with even taller hair, investigate online rumors, "MythBusters"-style. They examined whether you should pat someone on the back while the person is choking (no), whether you can report your location to the police using the numbers on telephone poles (yes) and whether it's possible to defrost meat in one minute using room-temperature water (yes, depending on the shape of the meat). Wong concluded with one more minute of jokes.
Most Chinese TV hosts are all ingratiating smiles and talky energy; Wong has the nervous manner of a teaching assistant running his first seminar. Watching his delivery and the audience's frequently awkward response, you wouldn't guess that he's one of the most successful stand-up comedians in China. This says as much about stand-up comedy in China, where the form is still in its infancy, as it does about Wong. When most audience members watch Wong perform, on the set of "Is It True?" or at one of his theater shows, they're not just seeing him for the first time: It's their first exposure to live stand-up, period. They're not always sure how to react.
Wong first encountered stand-up in 2001 in Houston, where he had moved from Beijing to get his Ph.D. in biochemistry at Rice University. One day, a friend took him to see the comedian Emo Philips. Wong didn't get a lot of the jokes, but he relished the atmosphere; he loved the fact that no one knew what Philips might say next.
He also thought he might have a knack for it himself. In China, he'd been popular, and known for his offbeat humor. "I was never the funniest, but maybe the second or third funniest," he told me. In Texas, to practice his English, he took a course with Toastmasters International, where he got some laughs. "I had a near-death experience once," he said in one speech. "I walked past a graveyard." After moving to Boston to work at a pharmaceutical company, he signed up for an evening comedy class at a local high school and started attending open-mike nights around the city.
His first show bombed. On a winter evening in 2002, he stood in a corner at Hannah's, a sports bar in Somerville, Mass., and told a joke about the New England foliage and another about how he didn't want to go back to China because there, he couldn't do what he did best: "be ethnic." A few friends in the audience smiled politely. After the show, a man came over to shake his hand. "I think you might be funny," he said. "But I couldn't understand a thing you said."
By that point, Wong, then in his 30s, was going through an identity crisis. He'd been in the United States for eight years, but he still felt like a ghost. His English was improving — he had read the Oxford English Dictionary cover to cover eight times — but to the ears of some Americans, he still spoke gibberish. He enjoyed chemical research, but he felt interchangeable with the next scientist. "I wanted to point to something and say, 'That's me,' " he said.
As Wong decided to keep telling jokes, the more he told, the better he got. Lizard Lounge, a tiny music club near Harvard Square, had a weekly stand-up contest — comedy at its most brutally meritocratic. Wong became a regular, testing out jokes at open mikes and culling the best ones for the competition. Finally, one week, he won. As he drove home through the snow that night, he was in shock. "I felt invincible," he said. He went on to win five more times.
In 2003, Wong was one of 96 comics picked to participate in the Boston Comedy Festival, where he was spotted by Eddie Brill, the booker for "Late Show With David Letterman." After several years of sending DVDs of his gradually improving act to Brill, he finally got the call to come to New York.
There was tension in the room when Wong first came onstage in April 2009. He didn't look like a late-night comedian so much as a confused tourist who had accidentally wandered into the CBS studio. His khaki pants were pulled high, and his face read panic. "Hi, everybody," he said, his voice straining. Letterman's audience chuckled nervously. Wong let the silence hang. Then he said, "So, uh, I'm Irish."
There was a wave of laughter, and then another wave as the absurdity of the statement sank in — an aftershock pattern that would become a Wong trademark. After that, he was flying. Every joke hit. The audience seemed to be laughing partly at the jokes themselves and partly at the unlikeliness of their vehicle. After seeing the routine, Louis C.K. praised Wong on his website: "Is this guy the best comedian in the country? No. But this set is very special."
Wong soon had a manager, an agent and a lawyer. He started working with Letterman's production company, Worldwide Pants, to develop a sitcom. He went on "Letterman" three more times and became a favorite on "The Ellen DeGeneres Show." In 2010, he was invited to perform at the Radio and Television Correspondents' Dinner in Washington. There, he addressed Vice President Joe Biden. "I actually read your autobiography, and today I see you," he said. "I think the book is much better."
After the correspondents' dinner, Wong noticed he was getting more fan mail from China. The video of his performance had gone viral on the other side of the world, where viewers were marveling that a Chinese comedian had mocked the vice president of the United States to his face. Chinese journalists began contacting him for interviews. Those requests soon gave way to serious offers, including an invitation from CCTV to host a new weekly show in Beijing.
Wong hadn't expected to move back to China. Stand-up barely existed there. Building it up would mean taking on decades of comedic tradition reinforced by a homogeneous, largely state-run media. There was also the potential risk of pursuing a form of entertainment that was synonymous with irreverence and tweaking authority under a government not known for its sense of humor. The country has a long history of subversive jokes, and people delight in poking fun at Communist Party leaders, but these jabs are usually made in private or anonymously online. For comedians, anonymity is not an option. They face a starker choice: to mock or not mock power?
But Wong, like many expatriates, felt the pull of his homeland and excitement at how rapidly it was changing. He also knew that an audience of 1.4 billion people, many of whom were just starting to take an interest in stand-up, was a major opportunity. "It's challenging," Wong told me. "But the potential market is huge."
Joe Wong on the set of the show he hosts for China's state-run CCTV2 network, "Is It True?" The show pairs Wong's stand-up comedy routine with science questions and experiments.
Credit... Sim Chi Yin/VII, for The New York Times-
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Joe Wong on the set of the show he hosts for China's state-run CCTV2 network, "Is It True?" The show pairs Wong's stand-up comedy routine with science questions and experiments.
Credit... Sim Chi Yin/VII, for The New York Times
Humor is stubbornly provincial. Comedic tastes differ by region, and most jokes don't translate well. (A Japanese interpreter once translated a joke that Jimmy Carter delivered during a lecture as: "President Carter told a funny story. Everyone must laugh.") One academic study compared Italians with Germans and found that the former had a stronger preference for sex jokes, while the latter had a greater appreciation for absurdist humor. Other studies found that Hungarians like gags about ethnic stereotypes more than the English do, while Americans enjoy aggressive humor more than Belgians, Hong Kongers, Senegalese or Japanese.
Comedy in the People's Republic isn't so much an attitude or philosophical viewpoint as it is a set of forms. The most widespread is xiangsheng — typically (if imperfectly) translated as "cross-talk" — a traditional two-person comedic performance that often features wordplay and references to Chinese literary classics, as well as singing and dancing. Cross-talk originated with street performers during the late Qing dynasty. In 1861, the Xianfeng Emperor died and the government declared a 100-day period of mourning, which meant all stage shows were canceled. Many artists resorted to illegal busking, and a Peking-opera performer named Zhu Shaowen hung up a sign in a public square: "I'm poor, and I'm not afraid to stand on the street corner and shoot the breeze," goes one loose translation.
Zhu changed his name to Qiong Bupa — "poor and unafraid" — and became the first cross-talk hero. Performers soon discovered that pairs attracted bigger crowds. In one classic bit, two men (they were always men) try to perform a famous Peking opera, but only one of them actually knows the script; the other is faking it, while trying to make the competent one look like the fool. The closest American analogue is Abbott and Costello.
Cross-talk was booming by the time the People's Republic of China was established in 1949. As a populist art form, it made an ideal medium for spreading standardized Mandarin and revolutionary ideology. Mao himself was a fan, summoning cross-talk masters to his house for private performances, including the out-of-favor traditional pieces.
The Cultural Revolution put an end to nonrevolutionary art of all kinds, and many of the old cross-talk scripts were destroyed or forgotten. But the form surged again after Mao's death in 1976, as years of pent-up anger gave way to satire. One famous routine from the '80s, "How to Take a Photograph," mocked revolutionary slogans in an exchange between the proprietor of a photo shop and a customer:
A: "Serve the People!" Comrade, I'd like to ask a question.
B: "Struggle Against Selfishness and Criticize Revisionism!" Go ahead.
A: "Destroy Capitalism and Elevate the Proletariat!" I'd like to have a picture taken.
B: "Do Away With the Private and Establish the Public!" What size?
A: "The Revolution Is Without Fault!" A three-inch photo.
B: "Rebellion Is Justified!" O.K., please give me the money.
The proliferation of television sets in China turned many actors into household names, and spread cross-talk, previously concentrated in the northeastern cities of Beijing and Tianjin, to far corners of the country. But after the massacre of protesters in Tiananmen Square in 1989, provocative sketches disappeared from television and were banned in teahouses. Cross-talk entered a creative ice age. "It wasn't funny anymore," said Mark Rowswell, a.k.a. Dashan, a Canadian who rose to fame in China for his cross-talk performances in the late 1980s and '90s. (Foreigners in China have all heard the backhanded compliment, "Your Chinese is good — but not as good as Dashan's.") The advent of the Internet has helped popularize cross-talk somewhat in recent years, but it lacks its former cultural influence.
Like many imports, stand-up comedy first made its way into China through Hong Kong. In the 1990s, the comedian Dayo Wong pioneered a form of stand-up that brimmed with political and cultural criticism. But stand-up didn't truly arrive until 2012, when a program called "Post-'80s Talk Show," starring the young slacker comedian Wang Zijian, debuted on the Dragon TV network. (The Mandarin word for "talk show" — tuokouxiu — is also used to mean "stand-up comedy," causing considerable confusion.) Wang, who cut his teeth as a cross-talk performer, initially resisted the idea of a stand-up show. "I didn't think it would work," he told me. But the show turned Wang into a household name, at least in the households of young urban sophisticates.
By the time Joe Wong returned to China in the summer of 2013, the country was in the midst of a comedy boomlet. In addition to the rise of the Internet and the success of Wang's show, the government played a role. After the bureau that oversees TV and radio restricted the number of "American Idol"-style music competitions and other foreign-influenced reality programming in a push to "build morality," networks turned to comedy, declaring 2014 the "year of comedy" and rolling out shows with names like "Kings of Comedy" and "Who Can Make the Comedians Laugh?" Suddenly stand-up comedy was everywhere, even if people still didn't quite know what it was.
"Why do people laugh?" Xi Jiangyue asked. It was the first day of a weekend-long stand-up comedy seminar, and Xi, the founder of the Beijing Talk Show Club, a group of a few dozen comedians that performs around Beijing, was starting with the basics. A half-dozen students sat in folding chairs on the upper floor of a community center in northwestern Beijing. A teacher from Guangxi Province had signed up in order to improve his public-speaking skills; a woman who worked at an advertising firm said she wanted to boost her confidence. The walls were lined with books (a biography of Karl Marx; Hillary Clinton's "It Takes a Village"), and a tabby cat roamed free, nuzzling shins.
Xi, a compact, 33-year-old former information-technology specialist with fearsome eyebrows, sipped Red Bull — it was 10 a.m. on a Saturday — and let the question hang in the air. "When they're happy?" one student volunteered. Another said: "When someone praises you." A third said: "When the result is different from their expectation."
Xi nodded encouragingly. The last student went on: "For example, 'I read a book that says smoking is bad for your health — so I quit reading.' " The group applauded.
Many people have tried to define comedy, Xi explained. Sigmund Freud said humor was a release of built-up psychic energy. Henri Bergson defined it as "something mechanical in something living" — a Tourette's patient, for example, or a priest letting loose a fart — and laughter as the response provoked by that phenomenon. The Chinese scholar Lin Yutang introduced the word "humor," transliterated as youmo, to the Chinese language — distinct from satire (fengci), wit (jijing), ridicule (chaoxiao) and slapstick (huaji). In a famous 1934 essay, he defined it as an attitude that "emerges when those who are intelligent begin to be suspicious of human wisdom and begin to see human stupidity, self-contradiction, stubborn bias and self-importance," and saw humor as a civilizing force. The great 20th-century Chinese writer Lu Xun said that "humor is funniness with feeling; funniness is humor without feeling." For the purposes of the class, Xi said, humor is simply something that defies expectations.
To demonstrate, Xi divided the class into pairs. One person would read a statement, to which his or her partner would come up with a snappy answer. "Your hair is a mess," a young woman said to her male partner. "I know, I'm handsome," he replied. "How tall are you?" she asked. "I'm as tall as Yao Ming's knee," he said.
This continued for several minutes, with more awkward titters than guffaws. "It's O.K.," Xi said. "It doesn't matter that your responses weren't funny. The first step is to develop the habit."
Xi ceded the floor to a fellow comedian named Song Qiyu, an impish 27-year-old with rimless glasses and a look of fixed amusement. He wore black sneakers with a gold Playboy logo. Onstage, Song is part stuttering Woody Allen, part deadpan Steven Wright, pacing nervously and deliberately butchering words with a thick, rural Shaanxi accent. He shushes the audience members anytime they laugh, which only makes them laugh harder.
Song had thought long and hard about comedy. He discovered stand-up when he saw a Joe Wong set online, and soon became obsessed with joke structure and the mechanics of humor. In 2011, he quit his job as a tutor and enrolled in a master's program for drama at the China Arts Research Institute in Beijing, specializing in comedy. He first picked up a microphone in the spring of 2013. Less than a year later, he placed second in a comedy contest hosted by Jiangxi Television, for which he won 20,000 yuan, or about $3,250. He was now doing stand-up full time (with a little help from his parents) and hoped to one day host his own TV show.
As the students listened, Song explained how to write a joke. An economics major in college, he liked to illustrate every lesson with a chart or graph. He drew a table on the blackboard and at the top wrote "Joke Generator." He then drew four columns and labeled them "Theme," "Attitude," "Skill" and "Performance."
Song picked a theme: love. Attitude, he explained, could be any idea about love. For example: "Love is hard." Skill meant fleshing out the idea. Why is love hard? "Love is hard because I'm a man," Song said — a pun, since "hard" sounds like "man" in Chinese. Performance, he said, meant delivery. Song gets a lot of comic mileage from his neurotic, mumbly manner; the same joke told by someone else might die on impact.
Song then described how to structure a routine (illustrated with a vertical line with dashes branching off it) and how to sequence jokes, from second-funniest to least funny to funniest (an inverted parabola graph). He was full of advice: Keep it brief. Don't joke about tragedy. Also, he said, comedians should take it slow early in their careers. For the first three to five years, they should tell short jokes. Around Year 6, they're ready to tell anecdotes. Only after Year 8 are they ready to express their personal opinions about the world, "like George Carlin."
If Wong inspired Song to tell jokes, Carlin made him want to do it for the rest of his life. A lot of comedians' styles are just "joke, joke, joke," Song told me. Carlin transcends mere joke-telling and taps into larger truths about the human experience. "What he does is high art," he said. "The best comedians, their view of life is deep. I have the skills, but not enough knowledge."
In stand-up, comedians like Song and Xi had discovered a vehicle for not only humor but also self-expression. "Cross-talk is just about laughing," Song told me. "Stand-up is about thinking, too." Whereas cross-talk actors mostly use scripts written by masters, stand-up comedians express their own opinions about the world; the form rewards uniqueness. And unlike some aspects of Chinese society, stand-up is refreshingly meritocratic. "If your jokes are funny, people laugh," Song said. "If your jokes are boring, people won't laugh, even if you're a celebrity." He argued that as China's economy continues to grow, and more workers join the middle class, stand-up will inevitably flourish, as material comfort gives people a greater desire to express their opinions.
Even before starting the Beijing Talk Show Club, Xi was always independent — he started two businesses in college, both of which failed — and didn't like working for other people. So in 2009, he quit his job in I.T. and threw himself into stand-up. His new life wasn't lucrative, but that wasn't the point: "I followed my own heart," he said.
Tony Chou, a comedian in Beijing who works as a CCTV journalist by day, was similarly romantic about his decision to pursue stand-up. "I'm a free soul," he told me. "I'm the only one from my college class doing a different job, pursuing my dreams. They're all engineers. I don't believe they all love engineering." Chou went into journalism because he thought it would be a way to share his own view of the world. "That turned out to be wrong," he said. "CCTV doesn't need personality." Stand-up, on the other hand, was all about being himself.
"China does not have stand-up comedy," Zhou Libo told me, reclining on a couch in his wood-paneled trailer in the southern city of Hangzhou. A slender 48-year-old man with an expressive, almost cartoonlike face and slicked-over hair, Zhou was surrounded by remote-controlled helicopters — "my toys," he called them. He had just finished filming an episode of his one-man TV show and had changed out of his bow-tie ensemble into a loose shirt, whose plunging neckline revealed a dangling sun pendant.
One of China's best-known comedians, Zhou got his start in the 1980s as the precocious youngest member of a Shanghai comedy troupe specializing in cross-talk and other traditional styles of performance. He disappeared from the stage for a decade after going to jail for attacking his girlfriend's father ("He swung first, but I was too fast," he told me), then returned in 2006 with a new personal brand, which he called haipai qingkou, or "Shanghai clean talk," featuring extended comic monologues on topics in the news. He now stars in the "Mr. Zhou Live Show" and has hosted and judged a number of other programs, including "China's Got Talent."
Zhou rejects the term "stand-up comedy" to describe his act because he does more than just talk: He sings, he dances, he does impressions. (Each episode of Zhou's show ends with him crooning an earnest ballad.) "They can't do what I do," he told me, referring to stand-up comedians. Zhou said he's skeptical of Joe Wong's prospects in China. "I don't think the Chinese market necessarily suits him," he said. "His style is very American. He can talk, but Chinese people want to see someone like me." He added: "Zhou Libo can give them excitement and deadpan jokes and opinions. What's not to like?"
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I had gone to see Zhou because I heard he had a reputation for tackling thorny topics in his act. "The subjects I talk about, Chinese politicians don't talk about, and foreign journalists don't dare ask — or if they did ask, they wouldn't get an answer," Zhou told me. One of his best-known routines deals with corrupt officials and the absurdity of calling them "the people's servants": "Where do you have servants riding in cars while the masters ride bicycles? Where do you have servants living in villas while the masters live in assigned housing? … Where do you have servants throwing around their masters' money without even informing their masters?"
Every episode of Zhou's show concludes with an audience Q. and A., during which the microphone is passed around, hot-potato style: Whoever is holding it when the music stops has to ask a question. During one taping, whether by chance or design, I found myself holding the mike. I stood up and asked Zhou what he would do if he were president of China for a day, then braced myself for an incisive critique of the country's power structure.
"I'd give everyone the day off," Zhou said.
While Zhou may venture into sensitive territory, he rarely says anything truly controversial. (Even his "people's servants" routine goes after an easy, government-approved target.) The reason, he said, is simple: "I'm patriotic. Wherever I go, I say: 'China is good.' " He always gives his honest opinion, he said — but his honest opinion is unlikely to ruffle any official feathers. "I mock responsibly," he said. "I'm not ridiculing." Referring to comedians who take jabs at China or its leadership, he said: "They're whiners, and they're detrimental to the country. If I were a government bureau, I'd shut them down."
The government bureaus are way ahead of him. In early June 2014, the week of the 25th anniversary of the Tiananmen Square massacre, Joe Wong and a few other comedians were getting ready to perform at 69 Cafe, a small bar in central Beijing. Two officials from the local cultural-affairs bureau walked in and approached the organizer, and suggested that they not perform. The officials didn't forbid it — it was just a recommendation, they said. The M.C. went onstage and announced that the show was canceled. "That's not funny!" someone in the audience yelled.
A week earlier, two officials dropped in on a Beijing theater show and upbraided one of the comedians for cracking a joke about the Chinese flag. After that, the Beijing Talk Show Club began treading carefully. Cautionary tales arise periodically: In 2012, a Beijing blogger was arrested for tweeting a joke about that year's national Communist Party meeting. This past April, a hand-held video of the CCTV host Bi Fujian — in which he sat at a private dinner singing a satirical, Mao-mocking version of an old revolutionary song — went viral. Bi was suspended and apologized for making comments that had a "detrimental impact on society."
Every comedian in China knows that there is a line, but no one knows exactly where it is. There's the obvious stuff — the "three T's" of Tibet, Taiwan and Tiananmen — but the details are anyone's guess. That's how censorship works best: Keep the rules vague, and let everyone police themselves. Some comedians stay clear of the line. Others edge toward it, place a toe on the far side, then skitter away. Occasionally someone plows right across it, but the results aren't always funny.
In practice, though, restrictions are usually felt only at high levels — on TV and in large theaters. In bars, comedians can say whatever they want, except during sensitive periods like the Tiananmen anniversary. "In China, sometimes you just have to wait a little bit, then you can do it again," Joe Wong told me. In the meantime, controversy isn't necessarily a bad thing, Song said: "The more you ban something, the more people want to see it."
But most comedians I spoke with argued that in China, there simply isn't much appetite for sharp-edged political comedy. "In the U.S., people are relatively free," Wang Zijian, the young TV host, told me. "They have time to follow racial issues or politics. Everyone has an opinion to chip in. The role of comedy shows is very different from China. Here, we're still at the stage of 'Just make me laugh.' "
In this sense, Chinese and American styles of comedy still differ radically. Discomfort is central to American stand-up — think Richard Pryor or Bill Hicks, or even Steve Martin. But in China, it tends to backfire. During the CCTV New Year's Gala in 2013, the normally friendly hosts decided, or were told, to make fun of each other. "It didn't work," said David Moser, an educator and commentator in Beijing who has long studied Chinese comedy. "They weren't raised on satire, so it just sounded mean and weird."
This, more than political restrictions, may be the biggest obstacle to the emergence of truly good stand-up in China: people's unwillingness to set aside their pride and take a joke. "If I talk about the Beijing smog, people will say: 'You're losing face for Beijing,' " Wang Zijian told me. A famous actress once called up Wang's producer, he said, and begged that they not tell any more jokes about her and her boyfriend. The producer agreed, wanting to preserve good relations.
In April, Joe Wong took the stage at a triple-decker riverfront theater in Tianjin. Since returning to China, Wong had discovered that the comic pose he honed in the United States — the guy who's just trying to make sense of a crazy new world — translated surprisingly well to China, because the China he returned to bore little resemblance to the one he left two decades earlier.
Since then, Beijing's official population had nearly doubled to 20 million, the city had added 10 subway lines and roads were clogged with cars. Neighborhoods had been razed, with luxury stores replacing older Beijing shops. People even looked different. "Some of the girls here are whiter than white Americans," Wong said. They'd become funnier too. "People born after 1990, they have a lot of personality," he said. "That was something I never experienced when I was in China. Everyone was pretty much the same."
Wong also discovered that navigating show business in China was even trickier than in the United States. Big theaters required performers to submit their scripts in advance — sometimes months ahead of a show. If the theater owner didn't like certain jokes, the management cut them.
The restrictions on TV were even tighter. "Is It True?" had given Wong a colossal audience and a steady paycheck. But the show was an awkward hybrid that combined stand-up with science experiments, and Wong found that he and the producers had competing visions. To appeal to a broad audience, they simplified complex jokes, or got rid of them altogether. Politics and religion were off limits, as usual, but even a harmless joke about infidelity was axed.
On the other hand, Wong found himself telling jokes that would never fly in America. "Here you can joke about fat people," he told me. "One of my writers is overweight, so we just wrote jokes making fun of him." It was also acceptable to joke about beating children, Wong said, and to compare people to animals.
Wong's act had evolved considerably over the past year. He still talked about his life in the United States, and the strangeness of being back in China. But onstage in Tianjin, he was more animated, more vaudevillian. Telling a story about skiing, he pantomimed climbing up the mountain and taking the chair lift down. He bugged out his eyes during punch lines and mugged for the audience. He sang a song, a version of "Don't Worry, Be Happy" with the lyrics changed to reflect the daily irritations of life in China. The crowd loved it.
"I would not sing a song in America," he told me later. "It's so uncool." Just as Wong had to learn what American audiences wanted — brevity, clarity, unexpected truths about American pieties — he was now learning how to perform for the Chinese.
Outside the theater hung a poster for the show featuring a smiling Wong surrounded by word bubbles, like the world's biggest business card: "Wise Comedian Specially Invited by the American President," "Top Performer on the Letterman Show," "Host of CCTV's 'Is It True?' " "Ph.D. in Biochemistry." It was a reminder that Wong's appeal lay not just in his jokes but also in his remarkable decision to tell jokes for a living in the first place. He had achieved the Chinese dream — grow up in a tiny village, study hard, go abroad, get a high-earning job — and discarded it for something even more rarely achieved: his own dream.
After returning to China, Wong gave a televised speech titled, "So What if It's Not Perfect?" In it, he urged young people to do what they love, without fear of failure. It's a cliché in the United States, but it strongly contradicts the conventional wisdom in China, where most authority figures emphasize stability and striving to be No. 1. "I now realize the meaning of life is to work hard to find your own inspiration, and letting that inspiration drive you," he told the audience, as they nodded along. Cheesy music played in the background.
Watching the video, I thought: A comedian would never do this in the United States. On the American stand-up circuit, ironic nihilism reigns. It's also taken for granted here that people can, if they want, spend their lives telling jokes to drunks in dark rooms. But in China, that idea is still novel — and, actually, kind of beautiful. Wong's career has been a radical experiment, and the results are still unclear. But what would comedy be without the potential for massive, humiliating defeat? "I am not thinking about going back," Wong said.
Source: https://www.nytimes.com/2015/05/24/magazine/can-china-take-a-joke.html
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