“Comedy is a very beautiful form of art, where you communicate with people through making them laugh. That requires a strong grasp of language and also the understanding of the culture,” multilingual comedian Norah Yang says.
When Norah Yang picks up my WeChat call, she switches seamlessly from Mandarin to English in a split second. For the first time ever, the Shanghai-based comedian is in Australia. She’s no foreigner to being in foreign countries though – since she started stand-up comedy in December 2016, Norah has performed hundreds of shows across China, North America, Thailand and Japan.
Self-proclaimed as China’s first multilingual comedian, Norah began her comedy career first in English, before performing in Mandarin (and more recently, in Japanese and Shanghainese). Her initiation into comedy was far from conventional. In late 2016, she was watching a comedy show with her friends in Hong Kong when an American comic made a joke about how Chinese people love to drink hot water. As she was the only Chinese person in the room, he came up to her and proceeded to explain that the joke was nothing personal.
With a few drinks in her, Norah roasted him back in front of an audience. “So then, the audience was clapping, they were laughing – that’s what my friend told me because I was pretty drunk,” Norah tells Missing Perspectives. “Then the comedian was like, ‘Oh my God, you should try open mic’. He was a very nice guy, he [was] like, ‘You should do that on stage!’”
This comic ended up introducing her to Andy Curtain, an Australian who owned Kung Fu Komedy Club in Shanghai, who set her up for her first open mic. “It was a disaster, I bombed so hard,” Norah reflects. But Andy saw potential in her and she gradually built up confidence.
Being funny is no mean feat. Being a woman in comedy comes with its own set of challenges. Performing in multiple languages is an entirely new beast. But Norah is quite optimistic about the industry she’s in, one that is typically known as a boys’ club.
“I think it's very interesting to see that in both the English and Mandarin scene in Shanghai, female representation is actually on the rise,” she says. Norah observes female representation in China’s comedy spaces as more equitable than in the Western countries she’s worked in. “The numbers are pretty promising and pretty optimistic.”
A potential reason for this is because China’s comics and audiences are relatively young because stand-up comedy there is relatively new. Norah suggests the average age of audiences in China is around 25 to 30, whereas in the States, the average age she sees is about 50.
Of course, demographic figures aren’t the only difference in foreign comedy scenes. Norah navigates a myriad of intangible factors when performing in new spaces: cultural values and local knowledge, for a start.
“Comedy is a very beautiful form of art, where you… communicate [with] people through making them laugh. That requires a strong grasp of language and also the understanding of the culture,” she says. In the past, she admits she was “trying to be lazy”. “I was like, 'Okay, maybe if I write one joke in English, I can easily translate that into Mandarin’. But that's not the case, because some of the references just don’t land [in another] language.”
Another major difference between Western and Eastern humour is what topics are considered taboo. When performing to Mandarin-speaking audiences, sex can be an uncomfortable subject. “Even the word itself, if it's ever translated or put in the context of a Mandarin situation, it just becomes so intense and you can tell that the audience [are] just breathing very hard.” With consideration to cultural values, Norah won’t explicitly mention sex, but will talk around it. “Like, ‘Oh, speaking of the thing that [your] parents [did] when you were born’,” she jests.
Off stage, the cultural expectations of women in China still weighs heavily on Norah and her colleagues. When she was starting out, a male comic jokingly warned her that she’d be single forever if she stayed in the industry. “I think entertainer, like the world in Chinese culture, doesn’t sound as sustainable as a family member, be it a husband or a wife; especially for a wife… Seeing a woman talking on stage is not something we see regular[ly],” she says.
Her husband is her biggest supporter and also one of the founders of comedy club SpicyComedy, alongside Norah. “He loves to see me shining on stage; that’s my biggest attraction to him… You can be single and funny. But you also can be married and funny."
“Women can be funny and attractive and loved the same time,” Norah adds. "What we're trying to do is we're trying to show society that… women are also entitled to speaking and making people laugh.”