Gu Dabaihua: Pop Entertainment Was Always Vulgar | 100 People With Ideas

"It may look vulgar, but there's something deep in it too."

In person, Gu Dabaihua is nothing like the internet celebrity who tells lowbrow jokes on Weibo.

He looks like what he is: a blunt, easygoing big man from the Northeast, tall, a little heavy, always smiling. His voice is deep, and a casual chat with him doesn't turn up much fun.

It is hard to believe that this is the man who has so successfully played "Gu Dabaihua" on Weibo. The account has more than 6.4 million followers, and the WeChat official account of the same name regularly passes 100,000 reads a post.

In February 2011, Gu Dabaihua posted his first translation of The Daily Show with Jon Stewart on Weibo, and the nickname for the host, Jon Stewart — "Jiong Situ" — spread from him. After that, Gu Dabaihua became something close to the face of the American talk show in China.

What he was curious about at the start was why The Daily Show had no rival in the United States. From 2004 on, he noticed, it took the Emmy for best variety talk series every single year, while the awards tied to drama series kept changing hands.

Gu Dabaihua was then an English teacher at a training school, comfortable enough with American TV, and he tracked down the original videos of The Daily Show. "But the first time I watched it, I fell apart. I couldn't understand a thing."

There were plenty of reasons he couldn't follow it. The speed of the talk was one. More important, in the United States the polite era of the Larry King talk show was over. The programs the new generation of Americans watched for evening entertainment were stuffed with slang, mocking every corner of American society in ways that were sharp but oblique, and every joke the host told rested on at least one inside reference.

Onstage the audience roared; Gu Dabaihua sat there with no idea why.

He needed a method. His first thought was Google Translate, but that crude cross-cultural tool soon proved useless. He started spending time on American news programs instead: what the talk shows mocked was usually whatever was in the news, and if some official somewhere let slip something stupid in an interview, Jiong Situ was unlikely to let it pass.

Once he understood all the references, Gu Dabaihua wanted to push the show on other people, and he began translating these talk shows himself. A larger-than-life "Gu Dabaihua" was being born. But first he had to keep as many of the punchlines alive as he could in the translation, and there he naturally had far more room to play than a fansub group working on an American drama.

The example he likes to cite comes from the 2012 US presidential race, when the Republican candidate Rick Perry suddenly forgot his lines during a televised debate and every talk show called it a "brain fart." The phrase means the brain seizes up and can't come up with what it meant to say. Gu Dabaihua made his own call: "Translate it as 'cerebral infarction' and it's too stiff and literal. Translate it as 'brain short-circuit' and it's colloquial but loses the comedy in 'fart.' My version was 'da nao ge pi' — the brain kicks the bucket, in a piece of slang that still has the fart in it."

Not refined, but a hit: the video was reposted more than 300 times, and this was 2011, when Gu Dabaihua was not yet famous. Later he set down some principles for his translations, which he called "domestication" — using down-to-earth Chinese words to carry the English meaning. Besides the sound play behind "Jiong Situ," he turned the taco, a Mexican corn wrap, into rou jia mo, the Chinese meat-stuffed flatbread, and turned Washington into "Huashengtun," a name that echoes the sound of "Washington" but reads like some dirt-poor little Chinese village.

One criticism aimed at Gu Dabaihua is that he is too vulgar.

His rise happened to coincide with Sina Weibo's best years. Since its official launch in 2009, Weibo had drawn in a large number of celebrities and "public intellectuals," who in turn pulled ordinary users along behind them. Through all of 2010, Sina Weibo added between 5 million and 10 million users a month. Weibo then was like a small society, generating its own hot topics.

"Joke writers" were one especially popular group on it. They saw that on this new social platform people wanted a bit of fun more than they wanted the news. Working from that, "Huiyi Zhuanyong Xiaomajia" spent his days showing off his absurdly cute Samoyed, "Tongdao Dashu" worked the zodiac, "Shitu Zi" drew comics, and "Liu Jishou" took pleasure in posting comments that came close to personal attacks.

Gu Dabaihua did not start out as this kind of lowbrow talk-show translator. When he opened his Weibo account in 2010, the feed looked like a grab bag: freak-show news items such as a man 255 centimeters tall marrying a woman 76 centimeters tall, "learn something" posts on English slang, and some Western entertainment news and plot summaries of American series.

But once he put out a large volume of American talk-show translations, people quickly filed him with the "joke writers" too. On Weibo he also grew close to big verified accounts including Ma Boyong and Shitu Zi. They went to a New York comic convention together, turned up in matching outfits by accident, and Shitu Zi made a point of photographing it and posting it to Weibo.

It was not a flattering label — the opposite of refined taste. But Gu Dabaihua wrote it into his Weibo bio without embarrassment: "There is no su without gu." The Chinese character for "vulgar" is built around the character of his own name; without Gu (Dabaihua), there is no vulgarity. Put it in his own voice: damn right I'm vulgar.

"Pop entertainment was always vulgar to begin with," Gu Dabaihua said. Then he added: "What counts as vulgar depends on the angle you look from. Vulgarity isn't pornography and violence, and it isn't cheap romance shorts either. Take a lot of the bits in American talk shows: they may look vulgar, but there's something deep in them too." It is only that, for various reasons, the deep part is hard to say outright.

Advertisers saw the value in that. Like most joke writers, Gu Dabaihua plants ads in his Weibo posts, or simply runs the ads straight. That recovers part of the time he spends translating the shows. He enjoys it anyway. "Watching the show, translating and encoding it, uploading the video — that's my way of unwinding," he said.

Other companies care more about what Gu Dabaihua opens up about American pop culture. Disney is one of them. This past August, Disney invited him to the United States for an event. It wanted his followers — people with at least some interest in American culture — to pay attention to the higher end of that culture: film and musical theater. Disney later invited him to another event, where Julie Taymor, who directed the stage version of The Lion King, walked through the reasons for its success.

Gu Dabaihua, for his part, looked like a straight-A student, taking notes and asking questions. Because of the talk-show translations, a larger world is opening to him. He used to live in Shenzhen and teach English; he has since moved to Beijing and even started a company of his own.

Asked what exactly the new company would do, Gu Dabaihua turned back into that blunt big man from the Northeast:

"It's not convenient to say right now. When the time is right, I'll be sure to tell you."

He smiled, in that deep voice.