This Was Funnier in China | Laszlo and Jesse Appell

“And the feedback from the publishers in 2018 and 2019 was the book is not pro-China and it's not anti-China, so it has no market in America. You could be either pro-China or anti-China. That's it. Yeah, like either you're pro or you're against, but there's no room for comedy and life and reality. And so I was like, I thought that was kind of bullshit.”

“And then out from behind the ship, this little vessel comes out, like a little power boat, and it was the Japanese Coast Guard. And they start yelling at me in Japanese. And I'm like, I'm the comedian. They realized I was supposed to be on the ship. So they let me board the Coast Guard vessel, and we start chasing the ship out to sea. And eventually, they're like, he's supposed to be on the ship. And they threw down, I'm not joking, a rope ladder. And so at speed, I had, so I brought a suitcase and a duffel bag, and I put the duffel bag around me and tightened it. So I could kind of like wear the suitcase as an uneven backpack as I walked up four flights of rope ladder.”

“Master Ding, as my teacher, one of his big things that he was like, fundamentally, this is what it means to be a professional comedian, is you show up for the show. You like, you might not kill every night. That's the way comedy works. Some nights you don't do a good job, but a professional shows up for the show. He was like, I just don't care. You said you were going to be here. Like I can deal with people who are not funny and they get better. I can't deal with people who say they're going to show up and they don't.”

“So I'm about at the right area. It's midnight. I've been on this bus for 10 hours. And finally I see headlights on the side of the road and I tell the driver, I'm like, let me off, let me off. I just get off the bus, the bus drives away and the headlights also drive away. It wasn't him. It was so cold. Like my hands were dead. And I found out that he wasn't on a car. He was on his elementary school friend's motorcycle. And I knew it was his elementary school friend's motorcycle because his elementary school friend was also on the motorcycle. So we three person motorcycled it in the dark with my suitcases all the way back to the village.”

“And in Hollywood, this has been a really good lesson as well. Like you'd be surprised how many people here are like, I will work with you even if your talent is lower than other people, if you show up on time and you respond to emails and you're a part of the project and you're respectful to everybody. Like people think of celebrities getting special treatment and they do, but everybody would rather not be giving a celebrity special treatment. They would rather work with somebody who is maybe not quite as good, but just better to work with.”

“And you know where he wanted to go? The number one place he wanted to go. Is this random parking lot in Monterey Park, because there's a Chinese influencer on Xiaohongshu, on Red Note, who's called Ding Pongzi, and Ding Pongzi has basically is running a channel about living in America as a homeless person. So he was homeless in California legally, as a legal resident, and started blogging about basically being a activist, for lack of a better term, for illegal workers in America. This is one of my days when I realized that old Hollywood is over. That this guy from China who grew up watching Hollywood movies comes to LA, and the place he wants to go is a parking lot, because of social media.”

“In order to do a setup well as a comedian, you need to know what the audience knows and what they don't know. So in America, if I say, like, you know, oh, my family is middle class, my mom drove a Toyota Camry. That kind of like, that reference is an anchor for people, but my mom driving a Toyota Camry means very different things in China. As a comedian, in order to make the joke work, you need to know your audience well enough to set them up well, so that when I tell the funny story or have the reveal or the reversal, I'm able to express that reversal in a way that they are not only understand, but are comfortable with and actually feel on an emotional level.”

“The best one I found if I wanted to talk about, just like I saw this in society. If I said I saw it on my Ponyo Char, like the circles, WeChat circles, everybody had the highest trust for WeChat circles, WeChat moments. Which I always thought was interesting because that's like in some way the least regulated because it's just a timeline feed. It shows you all your fault, everybody you're friends with, everything they share in a timeline feed with no editing. And weirdly enough, that's the most trust we can get now out of the media is like no triage of important or unimportant. The fact that it all shows up means it's the least censored news we get.”

“It's really kind of scary because it's like, when I started getting into Chinese cultural exchange, I was like, surely there are hundreds, if not thousands, if not tens of thousands of these cultural bridges. But nowadays, it's like, every year, there's fewer. A lot of the bridges are being destroyed purposefully, which is really disgusting. I always figured like, if the bridges died, it would be from like atrophy. But I never thought somebody would like purposely take a hammer to something like the Fulbright program to purposely destroy the exchange.”