Shaoyu Tang

Stand-up comedy has become popular in China since 2017, the same year when the party-state officially announced that citizens’ happiness and “the good life” would be central to its political agenda. This project examines how stand-up comedy is reshaping comedians’ and audiences’ understandings and enactments of being “happy citizens” in contemporary China. It does so by conducting twelve months of ethnographic research in Beijing. Particularly, I will interrogate how comedians, everyday audiences, and state regulators negotiate and articulate citizenship in relation to selfhood and collective publics through performing, evaluating, and regulating stand-up comedy. Specifically, I ask: 1) How do comedians reconstruct the notion of ziwo (self) through their co-production of humor and laughter with audiences? 2) How do they capture, articulate, and manage public feelings to produce humor and laughter not only in live theaters but also via social media and digital platforms? 3) How do they interact with state regulators, whose surveillance and censorship aim to redefine who can joke and laugh, and when and how? This project sheds new light on how people speak to state sovereignty about citizenship through stand-up comedy in postsocialist China, wherein “feeling happy” can be both a political promise and a citizen responsibility.