BEIJING, August 12, 2013 (City Weekend) — While many of us struggle to put what we learn in Chinese class into practice, fumbling over tones and slogging to string together a coherent sentence, comedian Jesse Appell is crosstalking his way to Beijing fame.
If his name sounds familiar, here’s why: he’s the galloping American that brought “Gangnam Style” a bit closer to home with his parody “Laowai Style” that made the rounds on the internet circuit earlier this year.
http://v.youku.com/v_show/id_XNDYwMTg3ODQ0.html?beta&
The video has been viewed about 2 million times on Youku and YouTube. Appell and his friends horsey trot across Beijing, thrusting their pelvises in front of all the city’s legendary hotspots and landmarks to lyrics like, “I’m the type of laowai who sucks at basketball. The type of laowai who buys stuff at the Silk Market but doesn’t get ripped off”—in Chinese.
That Appell made a competently funny parody video in fluent Chinese is impressive, but his current project is even more so—he wants us to laugh our way to intercultural understanding between China and the West, a concept he explores on his website and as a Fulbright scholar. “Multicultural problems often come from misunderstandings,” he says, “But if you know what someone thinks is funny, it can be a way to overcome these misunderstandings.”
Appell had been studying Chinese at Brandeis University in Massachusetts for about a year and a half before he first came to China. It was then that cultural and communication issues first became apparent. “I got to China and realized that one-and-a-half years of studying is not enough to even order food,” he says. “Once my language got up and I could make jokes, and people realized I was making jokes, it began to feel like it was home, real life.”
It was this element of communication through comedy that captured his interest while he was here doing an internship in the summer of 2011. The funnyman joined Beijing’s Bilingual Improv Group, which got him thinking, “What is the difference between Chinese and American humor?”
With this question in mind, he spoke to David Moser, a contemporary of Da Shan, aka Mark Roswell, a Canadian who is arguably the most famous laowai in China. Moser told him, “Don’t do improv. Do xiangsheng.”
And doing xiangsheng (aka crosstalk) he is, with the full backing of the Fulbright organization. He meets with Ding Laoshi, a master of the craft, several times a week to practice scripts and, like the rest of us, to continue to nail down the proper tones.
“The Fulbright is great, because I get to create something without worrying about how I’m going to sell it,” he says with a smirk. His Fulbright project is geared toward finding out what Chinese people think is funny, and how that might be able to facilitate cultural exchange and building up common ground between Chinese people and Americans.
“There’s this stereotype in America that Asians aren’t funny, which is totally not true,” he says. “And this colors how (Americans) see xiangsheng. They look at the physical comedy and don’t know the deep-level comedy going on or the audience-performer dynamic.”
But in the xiangsheng performances and Chinese stand-up routines he turns out across the mainland, he faces a very unique problem: “The audience is so interested in knowing how I know something that they forget to laugh, so I have to make up situations that tell how I might know that. They don’t expect you to know things, because you’re not Chinese.”
Some things will always be funny to everyone, everywhere, like someone slipping on a banana peel. All cultures are laughing at “awkwardness,” but what’s “awkward” is different from culture to culture, he says. For example, a Chinese joke: A mama fly and a baby fly are eating dinner. Baby fly says, “Mama, why do we have to eat shit every day?” Mama fly says, “It’s impolite to speak with your mouth full.” Find it funny? You and your Chinese friend might both be howling at this, but not for the same reasons.
“It’s not impossible to make two cultures laugh at the same joke, but it’s hard to make them laugh for the same reason,” he says, explaining that in a Peking opera performance an American might see something and think, “What is he doing? Haha!” and a Chinese person might see the same thing and think, “Wow! Look what he’s doing! Haha!”
Much of Appell’s research and work revolves around the concept that human beings everywhere are “very, very similar,” but we express these similarities differently.
For anyone to think something is funny, though, they have to be able to understand or identify with it. At the deepest level, in terms of content, Appell explains, different cultures are using the same content to make comedy—logic inversion, the joker/straight man dynamic, awkward situations, etc.—and we’re all laughing at basically the same jokes told in different ways. “Abbott and Costello—the back and forth is very funny. They have it down, and xiangsheng masters are the same; they don’t waste any words.”
What Appell is learning, however, is that language and culture do change a joke. There may be things we will all think are funny, but they may get lost in translation. Even xiang-sheng, when not done in Chinese, starts to become what he describes as “an art inspired by xiangsheng.”
But, hey, language, schmlanguage: “If you laugh with someone, you’re connecting with them on a mental and physical level,” he says.
It's Mikala! 