Is stand-up back? That’s the question Chinese comedy fans found themselves asking last month, when streamers iQiyi and Tencent Video launched “King of Comedy: Stand-up Season” and “Stand-up Comedy and Friends,” respectively. The shows are the first to feature stand-up performances since much of the industry was put on hiatus last May after an off-color joke by a performer at a Beijing show.

The crackdown, which focused on the country’s best-known standup promotion, Xiaoguo, was never absolute. Numerous small and medium-sized stand-up comedy clubs continued to put on in-person shows, which were filmed and edited into bite-sized bits for social media. That helped create the crop of stars now needed to support two stand-up comedy series. The early reactions from audiences have been enthusiastic: After over a year in the wilderness, the stand-up scene has returned arguably stronger than ever before.

That resilience speaks to stand-up’s popularity in China, where it’s come a long way since pioneers like the Hong Kong-based Dayo Wong cultivated regional followings in the 2000s.

The first time stand-up took the entirety of China by storm was Joe Wong’s set at the White House Correspondents’ Dinner in 2010. Almost immediately, stand-up comedy clubs sprouted up in Shenzhen, Shanghai, and Beijing. Even then, however, sets were sparsely attended and little care went into organizing venues; a club’s upkeep depended largely on the comedians themselves. There was no money to be made by doing stand-up, and no market to speak of.

The popularity of the “Tonight 80’s Talk Show,” which aired on the Shanghai-based Dragon TV in 2012, helped change that. In 2014, still high on the show’s success, its producers founded the Xiaoguo Culture Media Company. In comparison to earlier comedy clubs, which seemed to run on passion and little else, Xiaoguo Culture adopted a professionalized, commercialized approach from the get-go, signing key performers from “Tonight 80’s” and working to promote them.

At the same time, a rising crop of online platforms were looking for content and willing to take chances on niche entertainment. Shows like “The Rap of China,” “The Big Band,” “Dunk of China,” and “This is Fighting Robots” helped propel everything from rap and streetball to battlebots into the public consciousness.

Stand-up was a natural fit for the streaming boom, which was looking to meld entertainment with lifestyle content, social media, and advertising. Sometimes called the “supersized” or “blockbuster” variety program, the idea was pioneered by streaming platform Youku in 2017. Put simply, the idea was to turn episodes into events by blowing them up and airing them on traditional TV, streaming, and social media channels simultaneously.

Tencent and iQiyi quickly hopped on the bandwagon, and variety show spending ballooned. Since 2015, annual investment in “blockbuster” variety shows has jumped from 1 billion to an estimated 13 billion yuan ($141 million to $2 billion).

Xiaoguo released its “Roast!” and “Rock & Roast” series in 2017, just as the variety boom was taking off. Compared to talent competitions, dating reality shows, and travel shows, televised stand-up didn’t require as much in the way of funding and its production was much easier to manage. At the same time, it proved popular with coveted young demographics and repeatedly spawned viral content, making for what seemed to be a lucrative and relatively risk-free investment.

As stand-up’s popularity grew, local governments across China sought to cash in on the boom. Shenzhen, across the border from Hong Kong, called itself the “cradle of Chinese stand-up,” while the eastern province of Shandong referred to itself as the nation’s “number one stand-up province.” Shanghai — where Xiaoguo was based — successfully styled itself China’s “stand-up capital.”

This fertile mix of preferential policies, increased investment, and booming popular interest, stand-up comedy turned a niche cultural import into a mainstream industry. From a smattering of informal, offline performances to online variety shows integrating long and short videos, audio, livestreaming, and marketing with hundreds of brands, the entire process took less than 10 years.

Then it all went up in smoke. Xiaoguo, which was at the center of the storm last year, was fined $2 million by regulators for “major loopholes in management.” The two shows that have “returned” this year feature artists from different comedy promotions, suggesting that Xiaoguo’s monopoly on the industry is over. Otherwise, however, the scene seems fundamentally unchanged from 2023. Looking ahead, it’s hard to say what the future holds in store for China’s stand-up, but its history — a foreign comedy performance art that was successfully localized, industrialized, then devastated only to be revived — reveals the pitfalls and risks of the country’s popular culture model.

Translator: Lewis Wright; editor: Wu Haiyun. 

(Header image: Visuals from @脱口秀和Ta的朋友们 and @爱奇艺喜剧之王单口季 on Weibo, reedited by Sixth Tone)