Finding Myself through Laughter[:zh]笑声里的真我

(Editor’s Note: This blog was first written for our website www.ChinaPersonified.com (now part of One in a Billion) exactly six years ago . Jesse Appell – the author – is now a widely-recognized Chinese-speaking comedian living and working in Beijing. I will interview him next month for Season 3 of our podcast “One in a Billion” “This Chinese Life: What’s so funny!?”)

I’m moving to China to see if I can make people laugh.

If you think that’s a funny reason to leave my life in Boston behind and make for Beijing, you’re not alone. I do a double-take myself when I think of my goals for the next year. I wonder to myself: Is humor really as important as I think it is to understanding China?

This coming year I have a special opportunity to take a look inside comedy and how humor works in China, thanks to the U.S. Department of State and the Fulbright Fellowship. For fourteen months, I’m going to work on a project I designed myself, apprentice myself to a Chinese master comedian, and learn anything and everything I can about what makes people in China laugh.

The idea of a China comedy project came about slowly. It all started when I returned from study abroad in Beijing, where I studied language intensively and spoke little to no English for six months. Back home at Brandeis University, I rejoiced in being able to get back on stage and perform improv and sketch comedy.

Even back on stage with my friends, I still felt something missing. I loved performing, but China had become so ingrained in me that returning to my old life and compartmentalizing my China experiences just wasn’t an option. I needed to find a way to bring these two aspects of my life together.

In the summer of 2011, I interned at The Nature Conservancy in Beijing. During the day I would write reports on China’s environmental progress, and at night I found myself in comedy clubs and bilingual improv workshops. Throwing myself onstage to perform in Chinese was a challenge that I relished because of its sheer ludicrous difficulty. Every laugh from the audience contained a pulse of energy, and I felt as though I had my finger on the heartbeat of whatever it was that would bring my China life and comedy life together. (Here’s a video of me performing the “Who’s on First?” routine in Chinese!)

My dream took focus when I got the chance to meet a master performer named Ding Guangquan 丁广泉. Mr. Ding is a famous practitioner of the 200 year-old art of Xiangsheng 相声, a traditional Chinese art form of standup comedy. Seeing a Xiangsheng performance is an experience like no other—the performers jabber tongue twisters and word fountains, slap each other around the stage while shouting in loud Beijing accents, and generally and make jokes at each other’s expense. Mr. Ding is famous for training foreigners in the art, and was the teacher of the Canadian Mark Rowswell, better known as Da Shan 大山, whose Xiangsheng performances during the 1990 Chinese New Year’s gala made him arguably the most famous non-Chinese in China.

Mr. Ding promised to teach me Xiangsheng if I could find a way to move back, and now I’m doing just that. Humor is of real value. I know it, but more importantly, I feel it. After all, how can we ever learn to know others if we don’t know what makes them laugh?

 [:zh]