Joe Wong, stand-up comic

This article is by guest contributor David Moser.

Moser is author of several essays and articles previously published on Danwei, including Getting it up in China, The Three Stooges in China, The Mao Impersonators, Stifled Laughter, and Media “Schizophrenia”.

A young Chinese stand-up comedian recently made his debut on the David Letterman show.

Not an American-born Chinese, mind you, but a real born-in-the-PRC Chinese, looking like he would be more at home in the nerdy environs of a Qinghua University computer science classroom than on the glitzy Late Night stage ( Youtube link).

The comedian’s name was Joe Wong (Chinese name Huang Xi 黄西), and with the first few self-deprecating jokes delivered in his sincere non-native English, the jaded TV audience was clearly on his side. He “killed ‘em” — as they say in the stand-up biz — but gently. His stage persona was refreshingly soft-spoken and unpretentious, and his humor had an ineffable charm that set it apart from the usual talk show fare.

I am one of the growing club of foreigners who have lost face going on Chinese TV to perform xiangsheng, or “crosstalk” (arguably the closest Chinese cultural equivalent to American stand-up comedy), and this made me curious about Joe’s experiences in the other side of the cultural mirror, performing this most American of humor forms on American TV.

How had such a seemingly improbable cultural transplant made it to one of the most coveted spots on American late night TV?

Joe kindly consented to me interviewing him, and I talked to him over the phone in Boston on July 21.

***

David Moser: First off, how did you get the shot on the Letterman show?

Joe Wong: I’ve been doing standup comedy in the New England area for many years.

There’s a guy named Eddie Brill who is a talent scout for the David Letterman show. He’s a warm-up stand-up comic. Before the show he talks to the crowd to get them going, and then David Letterman comes on the stage and does his monologue.

But he’s also a talent scout, traveling across the country to attend showcases to see which new comedians might be promising for the show. He first saw me in Boston back in 2005. And I did really well in the showcase that night, and after the show he said to me “You’re on your way to the Letterman show.”

But he said I had to change some things, and he wanted some more material.” So I sent him a DVD with a five or seven minutes more material, and emailed back saying he liked one or two jokes, but he would need still more material. So I just took that as a “no”, and I never contacted him for another three years.

Moser: What??

Wong: Yeah, a lot of other comedians were saying “You should keep contacting Eddie, he seems pretty interested”, but I thought, oh well, he sees so many comedians all the time, I figured he had already forgotten about me.

But in 2008 he came to Boston again and wanted to see me, and we did another audition. And I did pretty well again, and this time he said “Okay, I think you’re pretty much ready now.” So from that point on we exchanged DVDs and he would say, like, “Maybe that joke’s a little too long, you could make it shorter.”

I guess on Letterman they don’t like the tag lines that much. You tell the joke and that’s it, you move on. So we went back and forth like this eight or nine times, and finally he just said “Okay, I think you’re ready,” and he found a date for me.

Moser: So what possessed you to try stand-up comedy?

Wong: Well, I had always been interested in American pop culture. I guess if hadn’t been, I would have been better at my job as a scientist.

When I was learning English, my teacher gave me a book on humor writing, and one of the articles was by Woody Allen. And it struck me as really funny. After that I started writing some articles for the campus newspaper, and one of them got published. And people started coming up to me saying “Your article is really funny,” so that was the first time I realized people might be able to appreciate my humor.

But not until 2001 did I realize that there was this art form called stand-up comedy. Before that I had never seen stand-up comedy, because I didn’t have cable TV until 2001. I graduated in 2000, and I began to go out with my co-workers, and one night we went to a stand-up comedy club in Houston, Texas.

Emo Phillips was performing that night. That night he didn’t do any of the weird stuff he had been doing. He just had regular hair, and he just sat on the stool and told jokes one after another. He was just killing that night. I could only understand about 50% of the jokes, but still, I was really impressed. Then the company I was with went bankrupt, and I moved to Boston. And when you move to a different place, you have different thoughts and ideas. I wanted to stand-up, but when I told a joke I got no response, because nobody expected me to tell a joke. So I thought “Maybe I should try this on stage.” So I started to take lessons in stand-up comedy at an adult education program in Brookline, Massachusetts, Brookline High School.

It was a six-week course, one class a week, and they taught just the basics of stand-up comedy, you know, the set-up, the punch line, and so forth. And they told you where all the comedy clubs are, and you could just go on and do it yourself.

Moser: So you actually started by taking stand-up comedy lessons at an adult education center in Brookline, Massachusetts? My god, I used to live there. Maybe I should have enrolled in that adult education center. But you must have also been learning by observing other comedians. Besides Woody Allen and Emo Phillips, who influenced you?

Wong: You know, when I watched Comedy Central, there were actually a lot of comedians I didn’t like, because some were very loud and obnoxious. They seemed to make people laugh more by style than by content. But one comedian I really liked was Steven Wright, he’s from Boston. I really liked his material. And as I started doing comedy, I began to like George Carlin, and Mitch Hedberg.

Moser: Yes, I’ve noticed you don’t go for the dirty stuff, the “blue humor”, or the ethnic humor, and your jokes are mostly based on playing with logic, as you once told me. I assume this was an intentional decision on your part?

Wong: I think it’s partly intentional, but it also fits my personality, as well. I can’t say I don’t have any dirty jokes, I have some dirty jokes, I just don’t have a lot. I have no problem with other people doing dirty jokes, as long as it’s smart and funny.

Moser: If I may ask, what’s your day gig? You’re a biochemist or something like that?

Wong: My background is in biochemistry. Right now I’m doing molecular biology research, mainly on cancer.

Moser: Ah, that’s a laugh riot, I’m sure.

Wong: Yeah, right. [laughs]

Moser: If you want to kill as a comedian, better to do it with cancer.

Wong: Well, in a sense, when I’m doing experiments in the lab, one of the things I do is screening for genes that cause cancer. And in a sense, doing comedy is like that, there are a lot of similarities. Just like screening a lot of genes, in comedy you have to also try a lot of jokes before you can find the ones that work.

Moser: I can see that, yes. But looking at it objectively, can you see how insane this all is? I mean, here you are a Chinese immigrant, a non-native speaker of English, a biochemist, and you say “Right, I think I’ll be a stand-up comedian.” It’s sheer chutzpah. You know the word chutzpah, right?

Wong: What’s the word? Chutzpah?

Moser: Yeah, it’s a Yiddish word, means a kind of brazen audacity, like, to have a lot of nerve, or a lot of gall. Even to the point of being outlandishly crazy about it. Doesn’t it strike you as wildly improbable that you would go into stand-up comedy?

Wong: Yeah, actually I’ve always found it a bit strange that other people think I’m an unlikely person to do this, because I think it’s a quite natural thing to do. Maybe it has something to do with my world view.

I used to read philosophy and stuff, and I’m not very religious either, so I pretty much feel that life is just a big joke. I mean, you have war criminals, and you also have saints, and people who work for their whole life, and in the end we all just die. What does it all mean? So for me, life itself is the biggest joke, and I’m just here to harvest smaller jokes from it.

Moser: That’s a great way of putting it.

Wong: By the way, I’m impressed by this word, chutzpah. I’ll try it on my manager, he’s Jewish.

Moser: Yeah, he’ll know the word. And as a stand-up comedian, you should probably be familiar with the word, too, I guess. Okay, let’s talk about the Chinese overlap with this. When you were growing up in China, were you interested in humor, and did you listen to the two-person comedy form xiangsheng, “crosstalk”?

Wong: Yes, I loved it when I was little. I grew up in the 80s, and that’s when xiangsheng was really popular. I lived in the northeast part of China, which is very rural. I remember in those winter afternoons I would walk back home from school listening to the radio.

The radio broadcast would play from these huge speakers all over the place mounted on telephone poles or electric poles, and sometimes I would just stand there and listen to xiangsheng until the broadcast was over and then go home. It was a lot of fun as a kid, I really enjoyed it. But I never thought of doing stand-up comedy in China. I did some sketches when I was in college. I wrote some sketches lampooning these Chinese movies, these revolutionary movies, where the heroes would never die, you know. Like the old American movies where the hero can suffer a thousand wounds and still keep going. [laughs] That kind of thing.

Moser: But when you’re doing stand-up in the U.S., do you ever make a connection to this other world of Chinese humor, xiangsheng and such? Is there a connection there for you, or does it seem to you like just two totally different worlds?

Wong: I think the latter, I don’t think of xiangsheng that much. In fact, the only time I really thought about xiangsheng was recently when I was going back to China, thinking to myself, “Oh, maybe I’ll check out xiangsheng.” The style is very different, after all, they’re not the same. When I think of stand-up comedy, I’m usually thinking of the American stuff, like Woody Allen or George Bush. These guys are stand-up comedians, but also they’re really philosophers, because—

Moser: Did you just say “George Bush”?

Wong: Ah, I’m sorry, I mean George Carlin. George Bush is another one. [laughs]

Moser: Freudian slip, maybe. I thought maybe you were making a subtle joke there.

Wong: But what I mean is, these stand-up comedians seem to have their own life philosophy, along with the humor. But I just don’t see that with the xiangsheng performers. They just have their style, which is very different. Also, I don’t like the kind of comedy where performers sing on stage, and xiangsheng does that quite a lot.

Moser: You told me that you were attracted to American stand-up because there was actually a lot of personal pain and sorrow mixed in with the comedy. Could you talk about that?

Wong: Yeah, that’s something that xiangsheng could get into more. They could get more personal, do something people could identify with. It’s like with a novel or a movie, the more personal it gets, the more fascinating it becomes.

Of course, not every aspect of your life is interesting, but if you go into it, you might find some aspect that everyone can identify with. I think if xiangsheng could rely less on humor techniques, and more on personal feeling. That would be a very new area to get into.

Moser: Do you think that xiangsheng could only make that breakthrough if there was also a loosening of censorship in the Chinese media? After all, the way it is now, sensitive topics are pretty taboo for humor.

Wong: I think media censorship definitely affects xiangsheng, for sure. But there is a way around it. The Chinese media is opening up a lot now, and there are a lot less restrictions, that’s one thing. But, as I mentioned, there are comedians like Woody Allen and Mitch Hedberg, who don’t really get into politics. But they can still come up with jokes that are very funny, and personal. I guess maybe the two cultures can learn from each other. American culture is very fast-paced, but it’s a little too frantic at times.

Moser: They could take a cue from xiangsheng, which is a more gentle, subtle form of humor?

Wong: Something like that.

Moser: Let’s get back to your own style. I assume you know the comedian Russell Peters?

Wong: Yes, sure.

Moser: He’s someone who uses his own ethnicity, and Asian identity, even appealing directly to the Asian audiences, though others can find it funny, too. But from what I’ve seen of your stuff – and I haven’t seen it all, by any means – you don’t tend to use your ethnicity all that much. You don’t downplay being Chinese or anything, but you also don’t use that as the basis for a lot of your humor. Is that a conscious decision, or was it something that you just aren’t that interested in exploring?

Wong: Part of me is thinking that the ethnic jokes are a little bit too easy for me. Especially when I first started doing stand-up, the jokes that would get the easiest laughs are the ethnic jokes. Even now, those jokes get really big laughs. But as I mature, I just like the challenge of not writing about my ethnic background, and I prefer to write about more general stuff.

My manager once said it very well, he said my ethnicity is like pepper, you know, the pepper in a dish, which if you put too much in it, it’s not going to taste so good. That kind of summarizes how I feel about my ethnicity. It’s something that I should talk about, otherwise the audience would feel weird. “Why is this Chinese guy on stage, and doesn’t talk about being Chinese?” So I can talk about it for a while, but I shouldn’t make my whole act based upon being Chinese. There are a lot of other topics I find interesting, and if I can make them funny, I feel prouder than if I just make jokes about my ethnic background.

Moser: I can see that. Another aspect of your style, one that is often mentioned, is the pace. It’s rather different from the usual stand-up style, which is boom-boom, rapid-fire punch lines, one joke after another with no space in between. But you often just let the joke sit there, let it sink in, for up to twice a long as other stand-up performers do. Was that something you were coached to do at some point, or did it arise naturally? Because it seems to work great for you.

Wong: Yeah, I think there are two reasons. When I first started doing stand-up, I would talk pretty fast on stage, and the more nervous I got, the faster I talked. Then a comedian friend of mine said, “Hey, Joe, you’ve got to slow down. You have to give the audience time to think, and then when they’ve got the joke, move on.” So I learned to pace myself on stage.

But for the Letterman show, the pace was even slower, because Eddie Brill and the others told me “Wait for the audience to finish laughing before you go on to the next joke, otherwise people won’t hear it.” I don’t know if you can tell from the YouTube video of the Letterman show, but when I was on the stage I could hear the laughter very well. So I had to wait till the laughter died down before I went on.

Moser: Yes, but what’s funny is the look you’re giving the audience during that time. It sort of looks like “How are we doing with that joke, folks? Has it sunk in yet? Need a little more time?” It’s your relation to the audience that is so funny. Steven Wright, one of your idols, will sometimes do that, as well, but he’s more deadpan, stony-faced. Whereas you’re just a kind of affable, friendly comedian up there, saying “Okay, can I go on to the next joke now?” The pause can be funnier than the joke.

Wong: Yeah, and also, when I perform stand-up at a regular comedy club I usually tend to smile quite a lot. But one of the producers on Letterman told me I should not smile too much. So I had to actually practice not smiling so much before I did that show. Anyway, that’s the reason for the pauses.

Moser: Yes, when I do xiangsheng here in China, I also tend to pause a lot between jokes, but that’s usually because I can’t remember the next line. Which brings us to that cross-cultural issue. What you’re doing can in some way be compared to someone like Da Shan, the famous Canadian who does xiangsheng here in China. I mean, you’re both non-native speakers, doing a very culturally-embedded, indigenous art form on TV. Have you thought of any comparisons between the two of you?

Wong: To be honest, I don’t remember too many of the routines that Da Shan did. I remember that name from when I was in China 14, 15 years ago. But I can’t remember any specific routines he did. So it might be hard for me to answer.

Moser: Right, sure. But one aspect you mentioned to me once was that Chinese TV people actually invited Da Shan to do skits and xiangsheng, whereas nobody in America was inviting you to do stand-up comedy.

Wong: Right, it’s very different being a foreigner in China. It’s more of a novelty in China, especially at that time when Da Shan first went there. There were so few foreigners then.

A lot of people from outside of Beijing would travel there, just to see the foreigners. They were like a tourist attraction. [laughs] But it strikes me how different our paths are, because in America I worked my butt off for seven and a half years before I got a chance for a 5-minute shot on American TV, but you, your first gig was on Chinese TV, right?

Moser: Right, yes, actually the first thing I ever did here was a skit on CCTV with Hou Yaohua, in about 1992. And I remember there were some lines in the script that I didn’t even know were jokes. So when I said them, and the audience laughed, I was thinking “What was that? Why are they laughing? Did I say something wrong?”

Wong: Wow. And you did it with Hou Yaohua, who is a dàwànr [“big shot”]. That’s the cultural difference.

Moser: That brings up an interesting point about being an outsider to the culture. We talked about how so many American stand-up comedians are Jewish, and it goes without saying that many of greatest comedians of all time have been black – Richard Pryor, Dick Gregory, etc. You could make the case that there something about having an outsider status that can be very effective in comedy. You know the persona, like Woody Allen, Jewish, a nerd, etc., or the class clown, the weirdo, the Pee Wee Herman, someone who’s sort of maladjusted or awkward, etc.

They’re able to channel that into humor. And you are also, from the American standpoint, a kind of outsider. You have an accent, you have the biochemist nerd thing going for you. So is that something you try to consciously use in some way, or do you just do what comes naturally on the stage?

Wong: For me it’s kind of unconscious. I don’t think of my outsider status when I’m writing or performing. But I think you do have a point, because comedy is basically a warped view of the world. It’s not the ordinary view. So you have to have some kind of experience or background that is outside of the normal for you to be a good comedian.

You need that different view of life. And I’ve found a lot of times that, jokes that work are thoughts that, to use George Carlin’s term, are “brain droppings” or something. Basically the nooks and crannies of your brain have all sorts of thoughts, and people usually just put them away. But the comedian has to pull them out and make them into a joke. If your life experience is unusual, you tend to go for those nooks and crannies and try to make sense out of life. I don’t know if I’m making sense here. [laughs]

Moser: No, it makes sense, but what I hear you saying is that you don’t have to consciously think of these things. It all just works because of who you are.

Wong: Yes, and I can remember that when I first came to America, certain jokes just came very easy. I would naturally find humor in every day life. For example, there was this scientific study quoted in the news that riding a bicycle carried a high risk of becoming impotent.

And I was like, “Well, almost everybody in China rides a bicycle, and look at the population there.” So these kinds of observations are pretty natural from the outsider’s point of view. So when I brought this up, people wouldn’t take it as a joke, they would just say “Oh, that makes sense.” But when I take that to the stage, it gets a laugh.

Moser: You said that when you first started watching stand-up comedy, you could only get about half the jokes. And when I watch xiangsheng, I also often have trouble getting the joke. Has that changed for you now, when you watch stand-up? Do you feel you get it completely?

Wong: I think I get it mostly now. If it’s a good joke, I think I’ll understand it, but if it’s just not going anywhere, maybe not. I think now I can usually get 99% of the jokes. It’s interesting, when I lived in China, we would read Reader’s Digest in English, and there were always these jokes in there. And a lot of the time, my classmates would understand all of the words in the joke, but they wouldn’t know why it was funny. So they would come to me and say “Hey, Joe, how does this joke work?” and I would be able to tell them why it was funny. So I think I already had this ability to understand American humor, even when I was in China. But after coming here I had to get used to all the slang and idioms before I could get all the humor.

Moser: I remember there was a version of your Letterman clip on the Chinese Internet, on which someone had added subtitles in Chinese to explain the jokes. I know xiangsheng comedians have a term, pír hòu (皮儿厚), “thick skinned”, which means the kind of joke that it takes a second or two to understand. The laugh doesn’t come instantly. It takes a second to sink in. And some of your jokes have that quality.

Steven Wright is like that, too. He has one-liners like: “You can’t have everything. Where would you put it?”

Wong: Yeah, or “It’s a small world, but I wouldn’t want to paint it.”

Moser: So I was wondering if you actually prefer these pír hòu type of jokes.

Wong: Yeah, I love them. Several years ago a comedian said to me, “Joe, what you are doing here is not comedy, it’s humor. Because people have to think about it a little bit before it’s really funny.” But I think actually the best comedy is humor. When I performed my stand-up routine in Beijing at the Haidian Theater last year, one of the xiangsheng performers came up and said to me – basically the same thing – he said for xiangsheng to work, the people have to laugh immediately. But he said for my stuff to work the people had to think for a minute, and that’s not good. That was his comment.

Moser: So your act here in Beijing was not xiangsheng, but just your stand-up routine translated into Chinese. How did that do over with the Chinese audiences?

Wong: It went okay, I got a couple of applause breaks, which was more than some of the other guys got. But I wasn’t that happy with it, because the people didn’t laugh that much.

I had trouble translating my jokes. My Chinese is getting rusty, and I’ve been outside the country for 14 years. And my Chinese wording is not very lively, maybe kind of stilted, not very up-to-date. I’m also not used to performing in Chinese on stage. I speak Chinese at home, but my projection on the stage is probably not right, or something. So there’s a lot of stuff I need to work on in order for my jokes to work in Chinese.

Moser: Maybe you’re not enough of an outsider here in China. Or you’re somewhere in between.

Wong: [laughs] Maybe. I just don’t have that edge.

Moser: And you can’t start out your act here in China with your opening joke “I’m from Ireland…”

Wong: Yeah, that won’t work.

Moser: But can you imagine coming back here to China and performing, not xiangsheng, but real stand-up comedy?

Wong: I’m thinking about that a lot right now. I had an opportunity to go back there this October, but my manager thinks things might get a little too hectic here in America for me. But I’ve thought about this a lot. Mainly because I keep getting emails from people in mainland China and Hong Kong, saying how much they like my comedy.

So I think there might be a market for this in China. But who knows? I might be pretty busy here in America for the next few years, developing possibly a TV series and stuff. But if I have time, I could spend some time in China and see how things go there. My dad has told me there’s quite a lot of English speakers in China now, which could be a new market. I know Russell Peters did tours in India, and he was really popular there.

Moser: Okay, thanks for your time, Joe. In closing, maybe you could give me a little exclusive scoop here, and tell me the very latest joke you’re working on for your act?

Wong: No problem. Here goes:

“Everybody has their claim to fame. Mine is that I used to be the youngest baby in the world. For a split second.

I think I’m gonna live a long time, because my grandfather passed away at the age of 94. He died from peer pressure. All his friends died and we couldn’t talk him out of it.

When I get old I won’t do things like get a face lift. I will do something creative with my excess skin, like Origami. I might be old, but my face is a swan!”