By Xu Xi
As a fan of stand-up comedy, as soon as I opened my RedNote (Xiaohongshu) recently, the big data pushed me several articles about Chinese-American comedian Jimmy O. Yang's stand-up shows at the Hong Kong Coliseum. Tickets for Jimmy's show were hard to come by, with the first pre-sale selling out in less than a minute and tickets originally priced at $780 being scalped to as much as $2,500 a piece. Some fans nostalgically expressed that after so many years, they came back to the Coliseum to watch Jimmy's talk show. Other fans even chartered a bus from Shenzhen to attend the show.
Jimmy's Asian debut on June 13 was a huge success, attracting not only fans, but also celebrities and his peer comedians. Hong Kong pop star Hacken Lee, stand-up comedy star Wong Tze Wah, who Jimmy loved since he was a child, and Shanghai's famous stand-up comedian Norah, all showed up to support him. Back in the land of his birth, Jimmy's performance incorporated more Hong Kong local elements, and he appeared more excited on stage. He sang and danced, and the cool fireworks, lighting, and sound effects made the audience extremely happy and memorable.
In response to the enthusiasm of tens of thousands of viewers, Jimmy has not only increased the number of shows in Hong Kong to five, but will also perform two shows in Macao in July. Since he opened his Xiaohongshu account in January this year, he has gained 732,000 fans and 1.617 million likes and favorites. The vast majority of his stand-up comedy is in English, seasoned with Cantonese. Some people don't speak English well enough to understand him without subtitles, but even they can't help but pay a high price for a ticket to see his live performance. Jimmy is one among the many Asian stand-up comedians in English, so why has his show crossed the Pacific and attracted so many Chinese viewers in such a short period of time? What is it about Jimmy as a person that makes him so warmly welcomed on Chinese social media?
If you're a frequent viewer of American stand-up comedy, you'll know that many of the special performances are centered around local political and cultural issues. If the audience has not lived abroad for a long time and is unfamiliar with these topics, it will be difficult to understand the memes and jokes, not to mention finding emotional echoes. Jimmy's performance is of a different style. Born in Hong Kong in 1987 to Shanghai parents, Jimmy moved with his family to the United States when he was 13. His performances are not keen on chasing current events, but rather telling his own story of growing up as an Asian immigrant and the joys and sorrows of his immigrant family. One of his most popular jokes on the Internet is when he imitates his mom, who buys a new watch and can't wait to show off her bargaining skills to her son: "Jimmy, ah, guess how much?" This Shanghai-accented English is a good-natured jibe that brings to life an Asian immigrant mother who is a smart, hard-working, and thrifty woman, reminding Chinese viewers of their own budget-conscious mothers at home. The title of this 2023 talk show is exactly "Guess How Much?". Jimmy recalls that since then, his performances have become more personal, and he started talking more about his family and his own real-life experiences. The English phrase that hit the Internet wasn't a figment of his imagination; it's how his mom speaks to him in her Shanghainese accent in daily life. The power of truth can transcend cultural barriers and resonate with people from different cultures. Jimmy has many friends from different countries and cultures, and some of his American and Arab friends have told him, "My mom also talks to me like that at home."
By 2025, the Trump administration had dramatically raised tariffs on imported goods, triggering a huge price spike and increasing anxiety among ordinary people about high prices. Instead of losing its popularity, the phrase "GUESS HOW MUCH" spread more widely. In a recent performance, one of his new jokes caught fire again. On stage, he said in all seriousness, "This show is gonna have a 100% tariff because I'm made in China." The audience laughed heartily. Since Trump took office, he has taken radical tariff measures that run counter to globalization, causing people around the world to suffer from rising prices. Jimmy's joke cleverly exposed the absurdity of the US tariff policy, spoke out the injustice in the hearts of ordinary people, and relieved the depression in everyone's heart with humor, which is precisely the reason why he was welcomed by the global audience.
Jimmy is especially popular with young people on Chinese social media because of his "atypical" path to success. Jimmy's parents are business elites who travel between China and the US Like most Asian parents, they want their children to go to a good high school, work hard, get into a prestigious university, study a practical and promising major, and become business or academic elites after graduation to become part of the US high society. Initially, Jimmy followed his parents' plan and went to Beverly Hills High School in an affluent neighborhood, then enrolled at the University of California, San Diego, where he first studied mechanical engineering and then switched to economics. However, after graduation, he did not continue to live according to his parents' expectations, but gave up a high salary at a well-known financial company to pursue his dream of acting, and after years of hard work, eventually became a top-rated comedian. In his performances, he often uses his own personal experiences to make fun of Asian parents, who love their children dearly but do not pay due respect to their children's interests and self-esteem, and always try to make their children grow up in accordance with the parents' planned routes. This complex emotional entanglement with their parents is something that resonates deeply with young Chinese people.
Jimmy, as he is today, has undoubtedly achieved great success in his acting career. However, success has not come easy. He has spoken in interviews about the rocky early days of his career. At the age of 21, he attended his first open mic and had to pay a $5 entry fee out of his own pocket. It took him a decade to find a very personal topic and style to performing before he organized his first special show, Good Deal, in 2020. In his opinion, the only way for stand-up comedians to improve is to perform in front of a real audience. He believed the beauty of performing live is that you get instant feedback from the audience. If the audience laughs, it's a sign to them that they enjoyed your jokes and can relate to the story you're telling. If they don't laugh, you go home, rewrite your script, and come back to the stage, and the next time you perform, you may get better results. It took him fifteen years of polishing his scripts offstage and thousands of performances onstage to find a style that suited him and moved the audience. He believes that comedy is not only about making the audience laugh, but also about sharing sincere feelings and telling true stories, and that only "truth" can move people. He also mentioned his own experience of going to Italy on an exchange trip when he was in college, and believes that it is more important for young people to travel abroad to broaden their horizons and develop an open vision of the world and a global awareness, rather than being confined to the classroom and books all day long.
Jimmy has countless fans on the internet and is a crowd pleaser in reality. Since the beginning of this year, he has posted photos with stars such as Chow Yun-Fat, Wong Tze Wah, Xu Zheng and Yao Ming on his personal account. However, when he first arrived in the United States, he used to hit the wall from time to time and made a lot of jokes because of the linguistic and cultural barrier. In the opening chapter of his autobiography, How to Become an American: an Immigrant's Guide to Disappointing Your Parents (2018), he recorded the embarrassment and confusion he felt at the time: on his first day of school, a girl greeted him with "What's up?" He hadn't learned the slang, so he looked up into the sky and saw nothing, so he replied, "I don't know." The girl finally realized he was either foreign or severely mentally handicapped, and explained that the phrase meant "How are you?" The next thing he heard was someone screaming out, "Heads up!" in the distance. He thought it was just another American slang expression of greeting and turned his head to answer, only to be hit straight in the gut by a flying American football. However, the many bumps in the road didn't knock Jimmy down, and he learned English through TV shows, eventually becoming an English talk show star with his talent for humor and diligent practice.
While helping his parents clean up the house, Jimmy pulled out a diary he had written in Hong Kong when he was nine years old from the basement. But after many years, the 37-year-old can no longer recognize the Chinese words he wrote by his own hand, so he had to ask his father to explain them to him. The incident was deeply embarrassing and prompted him to return to Hong Kong, Shanghai, and more Chinese cities to search for his "cultural roots". After more than 20 years, he was deeply shocked by the delicious food, convenient life, and advanced technology in Chinese cities. He had never seen these living, breathing, grounded scenes of life in China, because the American media presented China as an abstract topic limited to political and economic issues. His sharing of Chinese food and experiences on Xiaohongshu and Instagram has attracted the attention of many Chinese and foreign fans, especially those from overseas, who see the richness and splendor of life and culture in China today.
In a recent interview on China Global Television's program World Insight with Tian Wei, host Tian Wei described Jimmy O. Yang as a "bridge builder," a title that I thought accurately summarized his attributes. In this era of global political and economic turmoil and high trade walls, he has stayed true to his inner experience, choosing to be a cultural bridge-builder rather than a wall-builder. Using the art of language as a bridge, using humor with a distinctive personal style, and relying on sincere personal stories, he amuses the audience while quietly demonstrating the value of cross-cultural communication to the global audience, whose courage and wisdom are worthwhile for us to set the alarm clock again and grab the tickets for his coming shows on time.
Xu Xi is a literary scholar teaching at BNBU, Zhuhai. Xu holds a PhD from HKU.
The views do not necessarily reflect those of DotDotNews.
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