China Insiders: Jesse Appell on Cracking the Chinese Stand-Up Comedy Market

This week wespoke with Jesse Appell, an American comedian living in Beijing, about his views on Chinese comedy and performing for a Chinese audience.

read short versionread full version

How’s the comedy scene in China?
There can’t be more than a hundred hard core stand-up comedians in the country, but tuōkǒuxiù (脱口秀, “talk show”) is on every TV station. So it’s gone from three years before, when you couldn’t findtuōkǒuxiù and no one knew what it was, to now it’s everywhere but...