Netflix has made standup comedy big, but it also made young people think this is the way comedy is. This can’t be further from the truth. The kind of comedy that can be aired on Netflix has already been through layers of something called Standards and Practices. The real deal is raw comedy in a small comedy club that can seat less than 100 people where people have to drink no less than two drinks, while no cameras are allowed. Performing comedy in front of a camera is like filming porno in front of children — it is watered down a lot, and it also misses out the fun part of audience participation.
The first time I performed comedy was 10 years ago at Helium Club in Philadelphia when I was in business school. My classmates were so supportive that they laughed at everything I said. It was also quite easy to make the audience laugh if you knew precisely what they had been through: what worthless classes they took, which professors had Asian fetish, and yes, they all loved money. The hard part is if you are performing in front of an audience who come from different backgrounds and they are all in this room because they have paid money to see you, you have tons of pressure so if they don’t laugh at the first few jokes, you will panic. Comedy is the hardest form of public speaking so if you have nailed this, you will be invincible.
Over the past few years, I periodically performed in comedy clubs until the pandemic. I kept the habit of writing jokes at late night over the years as a way to cope with stress, and it is also a way to keep the creative side of my brain active. As an investor, I regularly meet creative people and hear creative ideas but my job itself isn’t in particular creative. I believe creativity is a lot like the earring hole or sex — if you don’t use it, you’ll lose it. Over time, writing jokes has forced me to think about how to come up truly original methods to invest and manage the fund: my portfolio is highly concentrated in a few great companies which was rarely seen in the business of VC (if you happen to work for one of my portfolio companies, please know that I care for your company like a bear mom to her cub, vs a fish mom to a million eggs), some of the terms on the term sheets are never seen in the market coz nobody else has attempted to do so, and I have also applied Markowitz’s Modern Portfolio Theory in VC fund portfolio construction (I might be the only VC that with a CFA btw). Writing comedy has saved me from insanity caused by being locked down for almost a year due to the pandemic.
I have only performed comedy in English so it is tempting for me to try performing comedy in Chinese. I watched the latest season of China’s version of Last Comic Standing to learn what doing comedy is like in China. The great thing is, there are so many talented people in comedy there, though most top ones are from Northeast China. The sad thing is, there are very few things you are allowed to talk about due to censorship so I have summarized all the topics in the series: I’m poor; I’m ugly; I’m miserably single; my boss is a jerk. Sadly, none of these is true for me. I spent a couple nights writing materials, and submitted for the first round of selection, but didn’t hear back. I sent to a friend to take a look, and said, this is as tame as it gets for me. She read it and said, you shouldn’t have said you used to live in a community specifically for mistresses in Shenzhen when you were working at your first job out of college, because the govt doesn’t want people to think that there are mistresses in China.
It all makes sense. In a country with cameras on every block and without end-to-end encrypted messaging app, talking about mistresses is forbidden. I thought I would bring fresh perspectives to China and save its comedy at the still nascent stage, but I have just been censored. Next time before I submit the materials, I will have my middle school politics teacher proof read it.
