Stand-up comedian Zhou Libo pokes fun at scalpers on stage at the Majestic Theater, but outside they are raking in money from selling tickets to his show.
"When they see me, they shout to me 'Go! Wenchuan (a Sichuan city destroyed in the May earthquake in 2008)! Go! Libo!'" says Zhou, 42, whose haipai qingkou, or Shanghai-style stand-up comedy, has become one of the hottest tickets in town.
Forty-five of the 62 shows he is scheduled to perform in up until the end of this year are sold out.
"A ticket worth 380 yuan ($55.64) can be resold for 1,500 yuan. Some of the scalpers make more than 10,000 yuan a week and one joked that he was putting down a deposit on a villa," Zhou says.
With hair parted over the left side of his head and a serious facial expression, Zhou looks more like your typical bad guy from old Chinese movies.
He speaks in a mixture of Shanghai dialect, Mandarin and sometimes English to talk about items in the news, imitate celebrities or point out the contradictions between different cultures in Shanghai and the northern provinces. He's not afraid to offend.
He does an impression of Premier Wen Jiabao dealing with the shoe-throwing incident on his visit to Cambridge University. He says the reason Chinese singer Liu Huan wore a plain black T-shirt to the opening ceremony of the Beijing Olympics was because he has a short neck. And he makes fun of government officials squandering 10 billion yuan to build a Maglev rail track that is just 30 km long.
In yet another joke, he responds to disparaging comments about how timid Shanghai men are by claiming major gangsters in the old days were Shanghainese, who hired assassins from the north.
When asked if he would share a stage with Xiao Shenyang and Guo Degang, two famous comedians from the north, he said they are as different as coffee and garlic.
Some of Zhou's humorous asides, however, have been criticized by netizens who claim it is typical Shanghai arrogance and discrimination. "I never intend to mock people. If you get the whole context of my jokes, you know I mean well. Plus, I admire Xiao Shenyang and Guo Degang," he says.
"No one would say people who drink coffee are better than those eat garlic. Every year, people around the world consume much more garlic than coffee. And Confucius ate garlic too.
"It is just that people from different places are different. For example, people from the northeast would say: 'I don't like you', in one sentence, whereas someone from Shanghai could spend six hours insinuating it."
Even so, Zhou does take note of criticism: "I have to consider the opinion of the public and subtle contradictions make people laugh too." Zhou says he wants his audience not only to laugh at his jokes but to think about them and the culture behind them. His colorful life experiences add spice to his humor.
His father was a big fan of huajixi, or comic drama, which first appeared in the 1930s and became popular in Shanghai and the adjacent Jiangsu and Zhejiang provinces. Zhou joined the government-owned Shanghai Comic Troupe when he was 15. The late huajixi master Zhou Bochun was his tutor.
He quickly rose to fame after playing minor roles in several popular dramas.
In the early 1990s, Zhou met a woman six years older than him and fell in love. The woman's family, however, were strongly against the relationship and Zhou injured his future father-in-law. He was jailed for 200 days and lost his job.
In 1992, Zhou became a financial broker and has since experienced the ups and downs of the business. In 2006 after another business failure, a close friend, Peking opera actor Guan Dongtian, persuaded him to return to the stage.
"Traditional huajixi are now full of cheap jokes because most performers are not well educated," he says.
"But the elites and well-educated need comedy too. And I believe Shanghai is a city of elites."
One day, Guan showed him a tape of stand-up comedy performed by a Hong Kong actor. Zhou told Guan that he could do it better and they decided to do a Shanghai-style stand-up comedy which Zhou dubbed "haipai qingkou".
"As an art form it distills the essence of huajixi," he says.
Writer Yu Qiuyu says that Zhou is a rare talent; while Sanskrit scholar Qian Wenzhong says Zhou turned up at the right time: "He established a new Shanghai comedy form when the traditional huajixi was sinking into oblivion and when there was a growing awareness of the Shanghai identity."
Zhou believes he was born to be on the stage.
"Every time I hear the last call before the show, I can feel my blood boiling like an excited horse about to start a race," he says. "What could be more fun than having 1,300 people laughing with you."
"I think of all the jokes myself," says Zhou, who spends four hours a day reading 14 different newspapers and making notes of funny conversations.
"I replenish my jokes at every show. Also, I have lot of friends who are talented and knowledgeable and who very often enlighten me."
In a recent show, Zhou talks about former South Korea president Roh Moo-hyun and compares the man who committed suicide after a corruption probe to Chen Shui-bian, the former leader of Taiwan province, who is in jail for corruption.
On being asked whether he expects to lose his popularity in a few years, Zhou says that if he was to count all the Shanghai people who want to see his show he will be able to keep performing until he is 70 years old.
"But I will never perform out of Shanghai because my jokes are deeply rooted in local culture," he says.
(China Daily July 1, 2009)
