On TV with Da Shan and Joe Wong! 与黄西和大山出现在电视上

I am not a person who is often starstruck, but this past Monday all bets were off when I found myself on a television show with comedy legends Da Shan and Joe Wong. We had been invited on the show to discuss intercultural comedy, exactly in line with my Fulbright project’s focus.

As I excitedly chatted with the two comedians, I realized that the people I am most interested in meeting are no longer people that my friends at home would know. In China, both Da Shan and Joe Wong are household names, although they arrived at that status by very different paths.

Da Shan is a Canadian (his English name is Mark Rowswell) who amazed Chinese all over the country when he performed Xiangsheng on television in the late 80s and early 90s. At the time, it was thought (especially in the countryside) that no foreigner spoke Chinese fluently enough to perform Xiangsheng, and as so his emergence as a media personality is a phenomenon particularly tied up with lives of all foreigners in China.

Da Shan is frequently held as the epitome of the ability of foreigners to learn Chinese—no matter what your language level is, Chinese people choose to compliment you by saying you are (almost) as good as Da Shan.

Joe Wong is the anti-matter to this equation—a Chinese national from Jilin province in the northeast who moved to America in his mid-20s to study for a Phd in Biochemistry. After living the Chinese dream—moving to America, getting a high degree, an excellent job, and eventually becoming an American citizen—he began to frequent sports bars to perform stand-up.

Years later his stand-up, much of the content of which revolves around his observations as a first-generation immigrant, earned him a spot to perform at the White House Correspondent’s dinner. There, he performed for Vice President Joe Biden and the White House press corps. “I read your autobiography, and today I have a chance to meet you,” he told the Vice President. “I think the book was much better.”

The discussion on the show revolved around each other their shared experiences learning the comedic landscape of a foreign nation. Both agreed there was no clear-cut “Chinese humor” or “foreign humor,” but rather, humor is a reflection of the culture of a country. Where cultures are similar, there can be shared jokes; where they differ, there can be jokes funny to one party and not to the other. Joe Wong mentioned a joke about parallel parking that flopped in China because what counts as crazy driving behavior in America is an everyday occurrence here.

They both agreed that while the styles of stand-up and Xiangsheng differed, the mode of delivery of a joke is just a “文字问题,” a matter of words. Clearly, there is some core to a joke, some logical inversion or social observation, which can be molded and then presented to the audience. Whether it is done in the style of Xiangsheng or by a stand-up comedian is perhaps irrelevant when trying to consider why the joke is funny in the first place.

While I rambled on a bit when I spoke—again, I need to remind myself that brevity is the soul of wit—I found my own thoughts stimulated by the whole of the discussion. If humor is a reflection of culture, then the way for me to become a better comedian is to better understand culture, and that’s exactly what I hope to be doing this year.

How can we use comedy to draw China and America closer? It’s not going to be easy, but I feel like joining into conversation with these two experts brought me a step further on the path of discovery. The end is nowhere near in sight—maybe there is no end—but it felt excellent to have planted my feet down in a solid step forward. Perhaps by understanding the culture here deeply, I can find those overlapping regions of culture, and with a comedic touch, make people realize we have much more in common than we might think.

我向来都不是一个追星的人，但自从上周一我和喜剧演员大山，黄西一起出现在电视上时，我就不这么认为自己了。我们被邀请去讨论跨文化喜剧，这也正是我的节目Fulbright的主题。 

当我非常兴奋的和他们俩聊天时，我发现自己现在喜欢交往的人和我以前在家喜欢交往的人不一样了。在中国，大山和黄西都是家喻户晓的人物虽然他们成功的道路不同。

大山是加拿大人（他的英文名字是Mark Rowswell）。 他在八十年代末九十年代初在电视上表演相声，让中国人都大吃一惊。那时，大家（特别是乡下的人）都认为外国人的中文不能流利到可以说相声。而他也是在那些居住在中国的外国人中一个媒体现象。

大山经常被当作外国人学中文的典型，无论一个外国人的中文水平怎么样，中国人在夸他时都会说你的英语几乎说的和大山一样好。

黄西则是一个正好相反的例子。他来自中国北方的吉林省，20多岁时来到美国留学，是生物化学博士。在实现了很多中国人的梦想-移民美国，得到高学位，好工作，成为美国公民-之后，他开始频繁的在运动主题酒吧表演脱口秀。

很多年来，他的脱口秀的内容都是他以一个第一代移民者身份对美国社会的观察，而这也为他赢得了在白宫记者会晚宴上位副总统拜登和众多记者表演的机会。他对拜登开玩笑说：“我曾经看过的你自传，今天有机会见到你，我觉得还是书比本人好。”

我们参加的节目内容是让我们分享自己有关学习一个外国喜剧的经验。他们都同意这里没有一个清楚的分界线来区分中国幽默和外国幽默，但是幽默确实是对一个国家文化的反应。一些相似文化的地方会有相同的笑话，而那些文化不同的地方则无法互相理解别的地区的笑话。黄西曾讲过一个有关平行停车的笑话，在中国没有人觉得好笑，但在美国却觉得好笑，因为平行停车这种行为在中国司空见惯在美国却是疯狂行为。

他们都同意虽然脱口秀和相声的形式不同，但都是一种传递笑话的方式，是一个有关文字的问题。显然有一些东西是笑话的核心，如逻辑反转和社会观察，这些可以成行并呈献给观众。当讲笑话为什么好笑摆在首位时，具体是以脱口秀或相声的形式表达笑话已经没什么关系了。

虽然我说话的时候天马行空，但我要提醒自己简洁是智慧的灵魂。我发现我的想法被这个谈话刺激到。如果说幽默是文化的反应，那么我想要成为一个好的喜剧演员就要更好的理解文化，这就是我今年要做的事。

我们怎样能利用喜剧将中国和美国更加接近？这确实不是一件容易的事，但是我发现这两位专家的谈话让我觉得我在寻求这个目的的道路上更近了一步。这一最终目的或近在在眼前，或者永无止境，但我觉得非常兴奋因为我计划脚踏实地的前进。也许通过深度了解文化，我可以发现两国之间文化重叠的部分，并通过喜剧让两国人民发现我们有比我们想象更多的共同点。