Standup comedy is an art. The jokes you tell are important, yes, but so is the performance: how you hold your mic, your on-stage persona, and your interaction with the audience (“crowd work”). Together, these elements create what might be described as “comedy.” It’s conceptually the simplest thing in the world, and in execution, one of the most difficult.
I dipped my toes in the comedy scene a year ago after spending some time with the Comedy Godfather of Hong Kong standup, Jami Gong. Jami owns TakeOut Comedy, a standup/improv club in SoHo, which was one of the first venues to establish the English language comedy scene in Asia. With its rise and other new entrants like comedy.hk, Rula Bula, Brewhouse, Champs, and one-offs (Hello Russell Peters! Hello David Sedaris!) I’ve watched comedy in Hong Kong really start cooking. Standup has improved by leaps and bounds in the last five years—when I came to Hong Kong eight years ago I didn’t laugh much; now I laugh all the time. That might be because now I’m rich and stopped dating psychos but, hey, maybe it’s the standup.
Performing standup is similar to what Hobbes said about the state of nature: it’s solitary, poor, nasty, brutish and short. And that’s when people are laughing (zing!). No, it’s pretty scary: your hands shake, you worry about forgetting your jokes, and you imagine some drunk jerk from JP Morgan yelling at you as you try to joke about being diagnosed with yellow fever. After a while it gets better, or you do: things flow comfortably and that drunk jerk is already passed out and you can mock him for being unsure if he’s sunburned or has Asian flush (zing 2!). But you—or at least I—still get that rush of nerves, that worry if people are going to laugh or sit there silently as you speak into that cold horrible void. It’s terrible and exhilarating simultaneously.
I’ve done about six shows in Hong Kong over the last year, which is just enough to know that you’re not part of the scene despite pretending to be. I stumble through jokes about entitled expats (me!) and failed relationships (me again!), channeling my inner Louis CK/Stephen Wright/Chris Rock/Jerry Seinfeld. It’s odd being up on stage and extremely fun as well; the nerves create an out-of-body experience, and I feel like I’m watching myself with the audience. I guess it’s my meditation, the same way some people’s yoga is getting drunk every Friday in LKF. To each his or her own, I guess, unless you want to tell me how much you like babies or cats, both of which are horrible unless they’re your own.
So I’m going to try to start coming regularly, to make a better commitment to the standup scene. To learn how to be funny in front of a bunch of paying strangers. It’ll all start in September, which is the start of the 8th Annual Hong Kong International Comedy Festival 2014, which is funny since I didn’t realize there were seven other Annual Hong Kong International Comedy Festival 2014s.1 There are lots of shows from early September to October2 but the exciting one will happen September 25-27, where I’ll try to compete to be one of the funniest people in Hong Kong, after CY Leung and his hilarious illegal structures.
So I guess you should come down, laugh lots, cheer for me and vote for me, because you once read one of my columns and it reminded you of when you were young and stupid in Hong Kong and also named Yalun Tu and drank far too much and were an expat and wore lots of blue shirts. Like anyone who went through high school, I know to focus not on the objective skills of it all, but of course on the popularity contest. It’s how I made it through life.