Who said becoming a Chinese stand-up comedian was easy? Stand-up may be a relatively new thing in China, but Des Bishop is propping up the door for others to put a foot in, even if he does have to apply to the censor for permission before every show.
In and amongst the many shows that have crossed the water from Ireland to take part in Origin Theater’s 1st Irish Festival, comedy, as one might expect, is discernible and plentiful. Getting laughed at is Des Bishop's business. For most stand-up comedians, timing is everything, but Bishop has gone the extra miles, all 5250 of them from Dublin to Beijing, to get the language right first.
At fourteen, Bishop was sent by his family to Ireland after getting expelled from school in his native New York. There he remained, becoming a successful comic, specializing in observational humor regarding his adoptive home and his efforts to assimilate. For the RTE (Ireland's public service broadcaster) documentary In the Name of the Fada, he pulled off learning the Irish language and telling jokes to the dwindling number who speak it. In 2013, RTE collaborated with him again; this time Bishop would go to China to fulfill a similar but more complex challenge, learning Mandarin with which to perform comedy. Chinese culture and the Mandarin language might have been alien to him, but in a population of 1.4 billion, even a bad joke can please a substantial sum.
In Made in China, currently playing in the basement of the Lower East Side bar Lucky Jack's, Des Bishop, originally from Flushing, Queens, an area known for its sizable Chinese populace, tells a story with the aid of stills and videos of a place that has captured and sustained his interest to the extent that he has made a career for himself in Beijing and stayed there long after his documentary crew returned home.
As for his introduction to the language, the meaning of Chinese characters are supposed to resemble their pictorial form, but as Bishop shows us, even the basic beginners symbols really don’t. As for the four tones with varied rising and falling inflections, what the novice Mandarin learner means to say can run the risk of offending.
Bishop's narrative over clips and photos takes us further in. In China, an unmarried 30+ man is highly unusual. Women as young as 27 are referred to as “leftover women”. Forced into dying his hair for the purposes of documentary continuity and acquiring a misjudged helmet hairdo, a synthetic looking Bishop takes part in a Chinese dating show. His special talent is a rendition of the Irish rebel song, 'Come out ye Black and Tans'. Another clip of him being moved almost to tears by wood-banging, roaring elderly people singing an ancient form of folk song not unlike noise art, is touching and funny.
A longer show might ease up his accelerated delivery and supplement the storytelling, but in the time available, Bishop's infectious enthusiasm for China is evident in his efforts to understand it from the inside out.
