At a recent open mic night at a bar in Beijing, a young Chinese comedian went out on a limb by telling a joke about intensifying censorship.
Rules that require clubs to screen performers’ content were about to come into force. Before long, he said, China would turn into the Soviet Union, where comics had to submit punch lines for preapproval.
Few in the audience laughed. But the fact that the gag was controversial reflected a sense of unease in Chinese stand-up comedy, a form of entertainment that has gone from a fringe activity in big cities to a cultural force across the country — and that has attracted growing scrutiny.
Rock & Roast, a last-person-standing competition that concluded its third season last year, has become an established presence on Chinese television, and live stand-up shows are popular nationwide.
But that success has also put stand-up in the spotlight for authorities and socially conservative commentators. The highly-charged undercurrent of nationalism being stoked by Beijing as it faces off against Washington and other western governments has amplified certain sensitivities.
Many comedians pointed to a 2010 performance by Joe Wong, a then-relatively unknown Chinese-American comic, at the White House correspondents’ dinner as the starting point of the rise of China’s stand-up scene.
The act largely explored the immigrant experience — “What’s Roe v Wade? Two ways of coming to the United States” — but it also packed the occasional punch for the US politicians. Wong told Joe Biden, then vice-president, that his autobiography had been more impressive than seeing him in the flesh.
The idea that a Chinese-born comedian could roast one of the world’s most powerful politicians ignited a fascination in China with comedy.
“It was a breath of fresh air for young people,” said Tony Chou, a former Chinese state television journalist and who now works as a comedian and performs in English and Mandarin.
But Chinese audience members have become increasingly touchy, Chou said, especially when he uses English terms or obliquely mentions topics deemed sensitive. “I always want to push the audience,” he said. “It’s easier with a western audience. You can be more edgy, a bit rude.”
Knowing how to police what they say is often second nature to those who work in China’s cultural industries. But official efforts to manage public discourse have expanded rapidly in the past year, making it more difficult for even experienced performers to experiment with risqué content.
The Culture and Tourism Bureau released a draft of rules last year to combat the “weak links” of censorship in live performances and make event organisers and clubs responsible for checking content. That came after an industry association released a 94-point list of rules for online platforms last February, including a prohibition on stand-up shows that indulged in “one-sided, extreme analysis of social issues”. Both decisions were implemented after China’s powerful television and radio regulator tightened rules for chat shows and comedy in 2018.
Years of intensifying censorship followed the cancellation The Vicious Liang Huan Show, a Chinese version of US-style late night talk shows, midway through its second season in 2017. The rationale was never made public but fans were quick to point to an audience member’s apparently oblique reference to Liu Xiaobo, the Nobel Peace-prize winning dissident who died of liver cancer while in Chinese police custody.
For Wong, who returned to China in 2013 to help build the stand-up comedy scene, the avoidance of certain topics is the way it is in China. “Because of China’s national condition, the majority of stand-ups will avoid sex and politics [and] there are not many people who pay attention to racial issues,” he said.
Yet China’s comedians habitually find themselves at the centre of controversy, even when they avoid politics entirely. In the latest season of Rock & Roast, the mostly male critics lambasted female comedians’ acts as too “aggressive” and feminist. When Yang Li, one of the contestants, joked about how men were able to “look so ordinary but be so self-confident”, it set off a firestorm online, with one well-known commentator accusing her of believing she was a “princess”.
The increasingly charged environment can make it difficult to find audience-appropriate material, especially for female comedians, said Bernice Ding, an amateur stand-up who advises avoiding politics entirely. “Because you never know if there could be a ‘little pink’ or ‘wolf warrior’ down there,” she said, referring to the country’s most ardent nationalists.
Additional reporting by Emma Zhou in Beijing and Qianer Liu in Shenzhen
The Link LonkApril 05, 2021 at 07:30AM
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China stand-up comics find authorities no longer get the joke - Financial Times
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