Playing the Joker

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.