Comedy United Nations Puts On Stand-Up, and Finds That Fighting for Free Expression Is Delicate Work | Great Little Studios

The jokes are hard to make, and so is the atmosphere.

A little after 5 p.m. on February 23, Storm Xu walked onto the stage at Comedy United Nations to music. He first had the audience applaud themselves for showing up, then told everyone there were drinks for sale behind them, and they weren't cheap — "if you can afford it, support us a little; everyone do what you can." The room let out its first laugh of the night.

Storm asked how many people had come from Shanghai, then poked fun at the city's habit of shutting outsiders out, and told a joke about his father's "adorable" version of that parochialism. His father once went to Chengdu on a trip, and Storm called to ask whether it was fun there, and whether he'd gone to see the giant pandas.

"Chengdu is so boring. This place has way too many outsiders!"

"Dad, you're in Chengdu — they're not the outsiders, you are."

"Ha gang ba gang" — Shanghainese for "what nonsense" — "how could a Shanghainese like me possibly be an outsider?"

It wasn't a new bit, but the audience laughed louder than before.

Comedy United Nations, on Middle Yan'an Road, is a room of no great size, with more than 100 chairs packed into it. To Storm's left, a curtain screens off a green room for performers waiting to go on, furnished with three sofas and a coffee table.

Storm, a 31-year-old stand-up comedian, was the emcee that night — warming up the crowd, introducing the performers, doing a few bits of his own in between. To audiences who know American-style stand-up — a form that likes to take its material from the real trivia of daily life, with a wide latitude for griping and satire — Storm reads as down-to-earth and funny. But what impresses people most about him is how hard he works. Since his first time on stage in 2012 he has performed live more than 2,000 times, more than anyone else in the scene — "and I've made the most money from it," he reckons.

"Maybe Storm hasn't performed for dignitaries in a grand auditorium, but his material all comes from life. He doesn't rely on self-deprecation or making a fool of himself to get laughs; instead, like the elder statesman George Carlin, he tries to find what's mundane yet absurd in everyday life, without singling out Westerners or Chinese people." That is how one Weibo user described Storm's style.

Storm founded Comedy United Nations too, hoping to use it as a platform to bring stand-up to more people. Some of the performers here are already fairly well known — Pang Bo, who won the televised contest Talk Show Competition (《脱口秀大赛》), also went on stage that night — others hold day jobs and perform at night, and still others are amateurs with no experience at all; Comedy United Nations runs an open mic for newcomers on Mondays. Besides the Chinese-language shows, there are English-language ones.

A few TV shows have made talk-show comedy less of a niche in recent years, but live performance, without the packaging, still hasn't spread far. In Chinese, "talk show" — the conversational format — and "stand-up comedy" — a comedian working solo with bits — get used interchangeably. Storm has one requirement for performers at Comedy United Nations: on stage, they say "stand-up comedy," not "talk show."

"Only if you guide people correctly will they ever become your fans, instead of coming because they saw it on TV, deciding it's nothing much, and leaving," Storm said. "This isn't a case of bad money driving out good. In the end, only the real thing can stand out."

1

Unlike a lot of acts, Storm does all his preparing in ordinary time; he doesn't even run through his material before going on.

On the morning of February 23 he was still in bed past 10, scrolling his phone and humming a Jay Chou song. If he hadn't booked an interview earlier, he would probably have gone on sleeping. The night before, after the show at Comedy United Nations, he and the other performers had a meeting that ran until midnight. Not tired afterward, Storm walked to the Liehuo arcade, one street from his home, and played games for two hours before going back to sleep.

A year ago Storm moved out of his parents' place in Minhang and into more convenient Jing'an District, where he lives alone in about 40 square meters. Apart from a photo of himself performing, propped against the wall on top of the refrigerator, nothing in the apartment says he is a comedian. The photo was a gift from a fan after a show in Fuzhou. Wanting to put on some scale, the organizers had booked a movie theater, and about 300 people came. What they overlooked is that a cinema's seating rises away from the screen, the opposite of what a comedy room needs. In a stand-up club, the performer looks down at the audience, not up at it.

Sitting in bed, Storm scrolled past the news that Brody Stevens — a comedian with depression who had appeared in The Hangover — had killed himself. "Damn, depression really is a killer," he wrote on Moments.

Then he emailed the organizers of the Melbourne comedy festival, where he would be performing in April. He told them not to promote him on radio or in magazines, because his main audience there is Chinese students studying abroad, who are used to getting their information from social media.

Once up, he spent most of the day in front of a computer screen. A newly registered WeChat official account had problems to sort out, and so did his personal accounts on Bilibili, Weibo and YouTube.

In between, Storm read sports news and marveled at Wu Lei's form in La Liga. Basketball is his favorite sport — back when he worked in Australia, he used to watch the NBA while fixing cars.

As Storm sees it, because comedy asks a performer to stay relaxed, that loose, unhurried state may be exactly what lets a comedian show himself at his best. It doesn't arrive overnight. When he started out, Storm went through a restless phase too, even scripting in advance what an audience member might say back to him. The planning kept a show from going off the rails, but it didn't produce the best results either.

In 2012, Storm took the stage for the first time at an open mic — a comedy slot open to anyone, where signing up is enough to get you on. Chinese-language stand-up had almost no audience then, so he told his jokes in English. The dozen or so people watching didn't react the way he'd hoped. Some laughed, but not at the jokes — they found the way Storm carried himself on stage funny.

"You'll laugh if you see someone trip and fall, but you won't think it's interesting. You'll think it's silly," Storm said.

Across a thousand-odd shows, Storm worked out a principle: on stage you have to hold your state, and not waver just because the audience isn't laughing. In a stand-up set, what matters most isn't whether any single bit is funny on its own, but whether you can hold the room's attention.

At 3:55 p.m., unable to "keep his eyes open," Storm lay back down. Twenty minutes later his alarm woke him. He threw on a jacket, put on an LA Dodgers cap, and rode his electric scooter the 1.5 kilometers to Comedy United Nations.

2

Storm first came across stand-up about 15 years ago. A fan of the NBA's Los Angeles Lakers, he was searching online for Shaquille O'Neal when he found a comedy show hosted by the Lakers center. The comedians on it — Kevin Hart or Dave Chappelle, as Storm remembers it — caught his attention at once.

"One thing was that it was funny, and the other was how exaggerated their body language was, how badly they wanted to say something," Storm said.

What held him was that stand-up lets you say what you actually think. "What stand-up encourages most is that whatever idea you have, you go express it. You don't have to cater to other people, right? As long as it's real, not malicious. Malicious is fine too, actually — what matters is how you say it. Some of what people call having the 'right values' isn't values at all, it's following the crowd. I put what's real first, and put what the crowd considers the right values a long way down the list," he said.

For Storm, real material comes out of his own upbringing, his years studying abroad, and the things he cares about — sports, politics, relations between men and women.

One of Storm's signature bits is about getting beaten as a child. He grew up in a shantytown in Yangpu District, where the neighbors could hear every sound of a beating coming from inside the house. On that premise Storm builds the punchline about parents asking teachers to hit their kids, and about how a beating trained a child's reflexes, so he could dodge danger fast out on the street (his own physical performance on stage drives the laugh home). And whether his father hit him had nothing to do with his grades — it depended on whether he had won or lost at mahjong.

To Ge Zhiyuan (stage name "Momo"), a close friend and fellow stand-up comedian, Storm is full of energy on stage, able to carry the room's mood, with a strong urge in his sets to state a view. That urge shows up elsewhere in his life: he airs opinions on all sorts of things through a podcast on iQiyi called Never Mind It (《伐要去管它》), recorded wherever and whenever, with little planning. After Li Zhi signed with Taihe Rye Music, Storm recorded an episode on a high-speed train the next day, on independence and freedom.

Storm sees stand-up as an act of fighting for free expression, and in his view, when a comedian speaks freely he stands, in some sense, not just for himself but for everyone.

"Really, why is it we comedians who are fighting for this right? If we don't fight for it, nobody in this society will. The room people have to say things, the right to speak, keeps shrinking. I think it's a noble thing, because in the moment I'm able to speak freely about something, we're fighting for that right on everyone's behalf," he said.

Storm has dealt with censorship too — for some commercial shows he has to submit his script in advance, and sometimes he is told to cut jokes — but it hasn't troubled him much. He has no intention of challenging anything politically sensitive (the jokes he is told to cut are ones officials find vulgar), because he thinks political material wouldn't land as funny in front of a domestic audience anyway.

"I can draw on all kinds of references to satirize what I want to say. I don't need to be direct about it, and I think that's the more sophisticated method," he said.

Storm started doing solo specials in 2017. Compared with telling scattered bits, a special is a chance for a comedian to show himself whole, and it asks more of him.

"What a special values isn't how each bit does, it's the coherence of the thing — whether your thinking, your point of view, holds together," Storm said. His first special, "Son of Yangpu," in the summer of 2017, was made of bits that each worked fine alone, but the effect fell short once they were put together.

George Carlin and Bill Burr are, in his eyes, the experts at that coherence, because the message and the point of view behind a whole show stay consistent. "The most important word in comedy is 'voice,' and there's no direct Chinese translation for it. The closest we can get is 'point of view.' Every one of his — George Carlin's — albums has a consistent point of view. So does Bill Burr," Storm said. Even now, he admits, he can come across as dominant in one bit and then play for pity to get laughs in the next, and he wants to change that.

His latest idea is to make a special tell a story the way a stage play does, because stand-up is full of possibilities: it can be political, like George Carlin, or it can involve puppets, like Jeff Dunham.

"I don't think this — stringing it together like a play — is the highest-level method, but it's what I want to try. I just think stand-up comedy is a thing with infinite possibilities," he said.

3

Comedy United Nations, which Storm founded, held its first show in 2015. That day he called in a crowd of friends to fill the room. For a while afterward, the shows drew almost no one.

Variety shows like Roast! (《吐槽大会》) and Rock & Roast (《脱口秀大会》) hadn't aired yet. Talk shows and stand-up were still a niche taste — even free shows rarely drew an audience — and there was no fixed venue.

Ge Zhiyuan is 36 this year. Five years ago a friend gave him a ticket to a stand-up show; he fell for the form and started working up material of his own. He first met Storm at a show four years ago that had been booked into a bar; when the bar had a last-minute conflict, the performers and the dozen or so audience members all moved to a conference room in a run-down hotel.

"It felt desolate, like some kind of pyramid-scheme meeting," Ge Zhiyuan said.

When he founded Comedy United Nations, Storm wasn't doing it full time. He was an automotive engineer, traveling for work to Anhui and Fujian while running the club on the side. Hunting for a venue, he asked at coffee shops big and small across the city, and was turned down every time. "The reasons were all over the map. Once I found a coffee shop I liked and wanted to rent the space, and the staff told me the Lunar New Year was coming, so they wouldn't rent it out," he said in an earlier interview.

In the end Storm rented office space from a friend. The room is his friend's office by day, and Comedy United Nations' time comes only after the sun goes down. Not long ago Storm had his eye on an empty storefront for rent near his home, thinking of turning it into a new venue. The ceiling was so low that a standing person would nearly hit his head — no good for most businesses, but fine for an audience sitting down to watch a show. Because of the rent and the uncertainty about demolition, he dropped the plan.

Pushed along by a run of TV and online shows, interest in stand-up warmed up, and Comedy United Nations gradually drew more performers and more audiences.

But performing on a TV show, in Storm's view, is very different from a raw live one. Live, there are no constraints of packaging or production effects; even a performer who builds a persona builds it out of his actual life. Storm points to Wang Zijian: on Tonight's 80s Talk Show (《今晚 80 后脱口秀》) Wang comes across as cheerful and joking, but in private he is fairly gloomy. If a stand-up comedian is the melancholy type, he should be making something of that on stage. Performers who got famous on TV come here too — Pang Bo, for one — but live they show a different side. Pang Bo's photo wasn't even on the poster for the February 23 show; he came on as a surprise guest. Storm felt that pushing Pang Bo's name would draw the wrong crowd.

"TV gives it to you in a roundabout way, gently, so you can take it. Stand-up is very direct, and if you've never been exposed to it you'll wonder why anyone would talk like that, and feel offended," Storm said. Bits about region or gender often leave a good part of an audience feeling offended.

At the top of a show, Storm delivers a few ground rules as jokes: no audio or video recording, for instance (photos are fine), and any back-and-forth with the audience is in jest, not meant to offend. The notices are printed in both languages on the tickets.

4

Storm's Comedy United Nations has 23 stand-up comedians under contract, 9 who perform in Chinese and 14 in English.

"This thing" — stand-up — "is still a job you do single-handed," Storm said of the club format. Comedians abroad never say they belong to a particular club. The format exists in China mainly because stand-up here is still at an early stage, and people have to band together to get anything done.

In 2016, Wang Qingheng (stage name "Nick") saw Storm perform for the first time at a talk show in Shenzhen. He had been trying stand-up himself for only six months. The show was in a bar, with more than 200 people watching and fairly professional lighting.

"Back then the whole environment didn't understand talk shows. Given that, pulling in that many people counted as a fairly big show," Wang Qingheng said. Storm had been invited to it, which said something about how well known he already was in the scene.

Wang Qingheng later moved to Shanghai, where he works as a screenwriter by day and goes to Comedy United Nations to perform after work. He got to know Storm and became one of the club's signed performers.

"Signed" isn't quite the right word, Wang Qingheng feels. Everyone in this business does it out of love, and there isn't much money in it right now, so "nobody is too calculating about the money side." He still works during the day and performs at night.

"I'd rather think of it as a partnership, not one side working for the other," Storm says. Comedy United Nations provides a platform — not only the equipment to perform, but crowd management for the audience. While a performer is on, someone keeps time, and when a set is about to run long, flashes a phone at the back of the room to signal him. The performers only have to polish their material.

Ge Zhiyuan isn't signed with Comedy United Nations. He also works a day job — planning sports events — and performs at night. He describes the relationships among people in the comedy scene as kindred spirits who respect one another.

After a show, the comedians compare notes, and it is common to give advice by roasting each other. What sticks with Ge Zhiyuan is a scene of everyone consoling everyone else: before the New Year, a show fell flat, and the mood at the dinner table afterward was low. Then they comforted each other, complained about the air conditioning and the sound system, and all felt a lot better.

At noon on February 23, Storm got a WeChat message. A performer, still not back from his hometown, couldn't make a show elsewhere that night and hoped Storm could cover for him. Storm couldn't get away from Comedy United Nations, so in the end it was Pang Bo who rushed over to save the show after finishing his own set.

Inside Comedy United Nations there is nothing like a hierarchy or a master-apprentice relationship. For one thing, the lessons of any given night usually apply only to that night — the next show brings different circumstances, and every performer has his own style. For another, as Wang Qingheng put it, the core value of talk shows and stand-up is rebellion, and a master-apprentice relationship would only be a constraint.

"Every performer wins the audience over and earns other performers' respect through his own set on stage. Nobody gets to act superior just because off stage he happens to run the place," Wang Qingheng said.

The cover image and photos in this article were provided by Comedy United Nations.