90后美國留學生在中國要求做小三

By Liu Xin Source:Global Times Published: 2018/12/17 18:33:40

Jesse Appell stages an improvisation performance in US-China Comedy Center on December 15 in Beijing. Photo: Liu Xin/GT

Comedian Jesse Appell puffs up his cheeks, and makes the Chinese sound of a frog - "gu, gu." Suddenly, he stretches out an arm, pretending it is a frog's tongue, and catches a fly.

The imitation makes more than 30 audience members who sit in front of Appell laugh and applaud generously. 

This was a moment that happened on Friday night in an old courtyard home, the US-China Comedy Center, a place hidden in a corner of Xiaojingchang hutong in central Beijing.

Every Friday and Saturday night, Appell, who was born in 1990 in Boston, stages an improvisation performance or standup comedy together with his friends from China or overseas in the center.

Appell founded the center in September 2016 - four years after he came to China to study Chinese comedy. Now he is promoting standup comedy and improvisation performance - a kind of comedic art that came to China not too long ago.

Different place, same humor

Appell told the Global Times that he had an interest in improvisation and standup comedy when he was little. He began to do improvisation in middle school.

"I am also interested in learning a different language… I chose to learn Chinese since it is the language that is used by the largest number of people," Appell said. He began to learn Chinese from high school and continued studying it in college.

 Appell applied to become a Fulbright scholar and came to China in September 2012, curious about the differences between Chinese and US comedy.

He learned about crosstalk or xiangsheng, a traditional Chinese comedic art, in order to understand more about local comedy. He managed to become an apprentice to Ding Guangquan, a master of xiangsheng.

Appell thinks that the gap between Chinese and US humor is not as big as people usually think. "We laugh at a joke because it is really hilarious, not because you take a glimpse of my passport and decide to laugh," Appell said. 

"Sometimes I feel that the humor of different cultures is 99 percent the same but sometimes I feel the 1 percent difference can destroy a joke," he said.

Finding empathy with audiences is important, and there are always topics that many people from different areas think hilarious, especially when life in metropolitan China is very similar to big cities in the US.

A comedian needs to accurately capture empathy and find a proper way to convey it, Appell said. 

He also admits that making the audiences comfortable is also very important, and for that reason he avoids making jokes about sensitive topics - like the trade friction between China and the US.

"Some standup comedy masters can make some sensitive topics acceptable and funny to audiences, and I am working on it," Appell said.

New forms, old jokes

Instead of becoming a xiangsheng performer, Appell chooses talk shows and improvisation to share his humor.

"When talking about the best performers of xiangsheng, the image of a middle-aged or senior Chinese man wearing long gown comes to mind. I knew I would never be the best xiangsheng performer - I can wear a long gown, but I am not a Chinese man," said Appell.

Compared with xiangsheng, standup comedy and improvisation are new to most Chinese audiences.

"When I first came to China in 2012, there were about seven to eight talk show performers in China," Appell said.

Appell witnessed the boom of talk shows in China, and as a standup comedian in China, he thought he was kind of "standing in front of the tide."

But as a foreign standup comedian, Appell has his own "fortune and misfortune." 

Some jokes Appell wrote about his first experience when coming to China in 2012 could still make audiences laugh, but that's not enough for him.

"If audiences laugh at my jokes because they were told by a foreigner, not because they are funny, my time as a comedian will not be long," said Appell.

A higher standard for his career requires more efforts. He needs to spend more time on polishing a joke.

"I used to tell a joke about how to differentiate two lunar rovers of the US and China on the Moon. 'When they back up, the US one would go 'beep, beep, beep,' while the Chinese one would go 'attention, backing up, attention, backing up,''" Appell said.

"But my Chinese audiences may question that how I knew this. So I changed it," he explained. "When I go back to the US, I can tell cars that were made in China by their sound backing up - 'Attention, backing up, attention, backing up.''" 

His identity as a foreigner gives him a different perspective of viewing what happens in China, but he refuses to let the identity confine him. 

He eats shaobing, or baked sesame-seed bread, for breakfast. He likes serving his friends tea using his Chinese tea set. He talks in fluent Chinese. He enjoys hanging out with his Chinese friends.

He said that he sometimes feels like an outsider when coming back to the US since his circle of work friends is in China. "I am not a foreign comedian, but a comedian who lives in a foreign country," Appell said.

Appell refused invitations from some Chinese entertainment companies to make videos on foreigners learning different Chinese dialects, even though the videos were sure to go viral.

"If I refused to do these videos, there will be other foreigners doing these. But if I did not found the US-China Comedy Center and promote standup comedy

 and improvisation, there may be few people doing this or doing it in the right way," Appell said.

Aside from doing an English standup comedy show and improvisation on Friday and Saturday night, Appell also has a free class for people who want to learn more about improvisation on Wednesday night.

Although he is a little shy of being called "an envoy" between the Chinese and US culture, Appell admits that what he did could help exchange the communication and understanding of people from China and the US.


Newspaper headline: Laugher without borders

大山老了，也更好玩了。