[Doctor Cao Xuenan was interviewed by South China Morning Post on 16 February 2023]
By Cyril Ip
- As geopolitical tensions soar, Chinese comics in the diaspora face balancing act between humour and humiliation
- Self-deprecating ethnic jokes that cross cultural red lines reinforce ‘racist stereotypes’, critics say
By the time Chinese-born comedian Huang He delivered her one-liner about the pandemic during an appearance as a contestant on Australia’s Got Talent in October, she had already drawn plenty of giggles with her disarming sincerity.
“I’m really sorry for the Covid, but I didn’t do it. I was here the whole time,” she quipped as the judges and the live studio audience burst into laughter. The moment, now preserved on YouTube, has since been viewed more than 4 million times.
During a stand-up routine at a popular comedy club at Sydney’s Chippo Hotel in 2020, Chinese-Australian policy analyst and comedian Vicky Xu Xiuzhong teased out laughs by deploying stereotypes to compare herself to a Huawei phone.
“We have a lot in common – we’re both cheap, easy to break, and a threat to national security.”
By the time Chinese-born comedian Huang He delivered her one-liner about the pandemic during an appearance as a contestant on Australia’s Got Talent in October, she had already drawn plenty of giggles with her disarming sincerity.
“I’m really sorry for the Covid, but I didn’t do it. I was here the whole time,” she quipped as the judges and the live studio audience burst into laughter. The moment, now preserved on YouTube, has since been viewed more than 4 million times.
During a stand-up routine at a popular comedy club at Sydney’s Chippo Hotel in 2020, Chinese-Australian policy analyst and comedian Vicky Xu Xiuzhong teased out laughs by deploying stereotypes to compare herself to a Huawei phone.
“We have a lot in common – we’re both cheap, easy to break, and a threat to national security.”
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As a host of issues, ranging from geopolitics to the pandemic continue to strain relations between China and Western countries, comedians from the Chinese diaspora have mined the troubled times for laughs.
In doing so, the ethnically infused, self-deprecating genre has shone the spotlight on a new crop of Asian comics who are earning fame and success in the West.
But not everyone is laughing.
Some in the Chinese diasporic community have taken offence to jokes from ethnic counterparts who they said use the spotlight to amplify cultural tropes for the sake of amusement.
By the time Chinese-born comedian Huang He delivered her one-liner about the pandemic during an appearance as a contestant on Australia’s Got Talent in October, she had already drawn plenty of giggles with her disarming sincerity.
“I’m really sorry for the Covid, but I didn’t do it. I was here the whole time,” she quipped as the judges and the live studio audience burst into laughter. The moment, now preserved on YouTube, has since been viewed more than 4 million times.
During a stand-up routine at a popular comedy club at Sydney’s Chippo Hotel in 2020, Chinese-Australian policy analyst and comedian Vicky Xu Xiuzhong teased out laughs by deploying stereotypes to compare herself to a Huawei phone.
“We have a lot in common – we’re both cheap, easy to break, and a threat to national security.”
As a host of issues, ranging from geopolitics to the pandemic continue to strain relations between China and Western countries, comedians from the Chinese diaspora have mined the troubled times for laughs.
In doing so, the ethnically infused, self-deprecating genre has shone the spotlight on a new crop of Asian comics who are earning fame and success in the West.
But not everyone is laughing.
Some in the Chinese diasporic community have taken offence to jokes from ethnic counterparts who they said use the spotlight to amplify cultural tropes for the sake of amusement.
“Race traitors”, has become a popular label on social media like Twitter, used by people who feel their cultural values, or symbols associated with their nationality, are being traded for laughs against a backdrop of rising anti-Chinese hate crimes.
“Comedy and laughter have the pacifying effect of making things sound natural even when they are not … By making the idea of [Covid-19 conspiracy theories] more visible, they could also normalise it,” said Cao Xuenan, an assistant professor of cultural studies at the Chinese University of Hong Kong, who studies media, literature and popular culture about modern China.
Cao said comedians must walk a fine line when performing racial or political jokes, which if not delivered or received properly, could have unintended consequences.
“A good comedian would seem to naturalise some stereotypes, but would also add something that is unmistakably a critique of [the stereotypes],” said Cao, adding that in this fashion, the jokes could also serve as a form of defiance.
Overseas Chinese comedians are expected by both their Western and Chinese fans to discuss their race, albeit with different expectations of how their race should be represented on stage, according to Cao.
“If a Chinese-speaking person or immigrant is using the English language to perform comedy to an English-speaking audience, they occupy a special status and fulfil a special interest,” Cao said.
“A white comedian has all topics open to them, including sex, parenthood, contemporary politics and all kinds of things related to everyday life, whereas an ‘ethnic’ comedian is often compelled to choose the specialised area of race, as if they have a responsibility to explain their ethnic or national identity in their act.”
The heightened sensitivity towards racial content, Cao argued, was partly caused by people’s evolving awareness of global affairs, especially given the growing access that mainland Chinese have to Western media.
“There are now Chinese language media explaining and translating American news, which broadens the variety of media available in mainland China, and a population that was previously unexposed to these discourses may become more interested and sensitive,” he said.
Huang has also played with the concept of leftover women, known as sheng nu in Chinese, which refers to women who are unmarried by the age of 27. Huang joked that on her online dating profile, she compared herself to “Chinese leftovers”, saying “we are yummy and cheap … just take me home and eat me”.
Her performance in Sydney in October has got mixed reviews from China’s online community. On Weibo, some users said that stand-up comedy was by nature sarcastic and offensive, while others felt that she had disrespected herself and reinforced Western ignorance of views on Chinese women in exchange for laughs.
“She wanted to become famous abroad, so she had to discredit her motherland,” wrote a user. “Do not you know how stand-up comedy came about? It started as political satire,” wrote another.
The timing of Huang’s performance may have been a factor in how it was received. In October, Beijing faced growing calls from both at home and abroad to lift its zero-Covid restrictions, which it began to do in November. The tensions may have further stoked sensitivities in online forums, especially regarding politically-related topics.
Speaking to Australian media, Huang said Chinese people rarely spoke out against stereotypes and that comedy was the perfect place to address them, suggesting that she did intend to call them out.
Both Huang and Xu were invited by the Post to comment for this story, but had not responded by the time of publication.
As a performing art, stand-up comedy is still a predominantly Western and masculine form of entertainment. But comedians from ethnic minorities are finding their place in the scene as their reputations grow. Those who parody race, however, should not be automatically blamed for the stigmatisation of Chinese communities in the West, Cao argued.
“Comedians recycle material they’ve already heard, so if news media – Western or Chinese – acted as a kind of propaganda multiplier and amplifier, making some stories more prominent than others, the comedian’s role is to use that language that is already circulating to create their material.”
Huang’s surge in online popularity was a “delight” that made her more confident about telling jokes about China, she told the BBC.
“I’m proud of my Chinese heritage, but that doesn’t mean I cannot make fun of ourselves [for] having fault,” Huang said. “Sarcasm, nowadays for Chinese people, is just really hard to get, anything bad about China you say to foreigners can be regarded as [though] you’re humiliating your culture, a disgrace to your country.”
Asian-American political commentator Amanda Yee, whose podcast Radio Free Amanda analyses current events from an “anti-imperialist perspective”, says most diasporic comedians are not concerned with reaching or pleasing their ethnic counterparts.
“Like a lot of comedians, what these diaspora comics are primarily interested in is commercial success, which necessitates writing jokes for a particular or mainstream audience, who is typically white,” said the Brooklyn-based writer, adding that many in the Asian diaspora had had to assimilate from an early age and are thus “fundamentally disconnected” from their countries of origin.
White Americans had an “uneasy relationship” with race, an area that performers used to experiment in, Yee said.
“What these comedians do is they create material out of their otherness – their family’s thick accents, strict upbringing and cultural traditions – juxtaposed to Western ones, so that the comedy becomes a vehicle for their audience to laugh at foreignness. Yet it’s considered acceptable and not racist for them to laugh at the joke, because the comic is Asian,” she said.
Yee has often warned of the dangers of exploiting racial differences for the purpose of comedy, which has sparked considerable debate on platforms like Twitter, where she has more than 75,000 followers.
“The danger of combining self-deprecation with material about race is that they end up performing or exaggerating certain racist stereotypes or aspects of foreignness for the audience they are in front of,” Yee said.
“A lot of times, the opening line for any Asian diaspora comic is ‘so I’m Asian’, or so ‘I’m Chinese’, and that will immediately receive uproarious laughter from the audience,” said Yee, adding that such reactions reflected the problematic perceptions Western audiences had about China.
The almost-apologetic declarations of a Chinese comedian’s place of origin – in Huang’s case “I’m made in China” – often accompanied by an awkward expression, may be a subtle reflection of the growing discord between China and Western countries, especially the United States.
Pew Research Centre surveys showed that more than three-quarters of US adults have consistently expressed an unfavourable opinion of China over the past three years – 79 per cent in 2020, 76 per cent in 2021 and 82 per cent in 2022 – marking a huge jump from 47 per cent in 2017.
In a skit that Chinese-American stand-up comedian Li Lin posted on TikTok, she said she understood a rumour that Tesla CEO Elon Musk was “half-Chinese”. “He slave drives his employees at his company, he does not care about the women in his life, and he only cares about money – what’s more Chinese than that?,” she quipped.
Performers should avoid reinforcing “reductive” representations of Chinese culture and instead seek to give their audience “a glimpse of the nuances”, according to Sheng Zou, an interdisciplinary media scholar and assistant professor at Baptist University.
“As public figures, they should think about the social responsibility of doing something to improve the representation of diaspora communities. We do not always want to hear a reductionist representation of a very culturally and ideologically diverse group,” said Zou, who has researched Chinese diasporic media.
Chinese family values and parents’ wishes for their children to be married and have a good job were exaggerated by some performers for comedic purposes, Zou said, but many of those expectations in fact related to “human desires” and were common across many societies.
Moreover, the younger generation in China, much like their Western counterparts, are growingly individualistic when it comes to planning their lives and careers. Zou said racialised comedy could explore cross-cultural commonalities as well.
The meaning behind an act can get lost and prompt negative reactions from Chinese audiences if a performer only mocks their culture, resulting in a lost opportunity to provoke thought or provide justification, according to Zou.
“The intentionality is sometimes not very clear – whether it is to expose this kind of pre-existing stereotypes or just leveraging them for the comedian’s own gains,” said Zou, adding that overuse of racist tropes for laughs was “picking low hanging fruit”.
Zou said striking a balance between cultural sensitivity and comedy, especially amid growing tensions between China and the West, was a task that overseas Chinese comedians must tackle carefully.
“Whatever you say in public will have social implications and ramifications, and you have to bear the consequences.”