We sat down with Kuan-wen Huang ahead of their show at Soho Theatre on Friday 16th Feb. This is part of Soho Rising Festival 2024, a celebration of new work created by comedians, writers and performers who have taken part in our Writers’ Lab, Comedy Lab or Cabaret & Drag Lab programmes.
1. You’re handling some big topics in your debut show – how have you approached curating your material?
There are quite a few facets of myself that I draw inspirations from in my comedy so when I gig around, my comedy sets have a good mix of topics and perspectives. I might even say some of these sides of me are quite compartmentalised. The question came before I started writing my first solo show at Edinburgh Fringe: what should be the main angle of this show?
Should it be the angle of an East Asian comic, a gay/queer comic, an East Asian gay comic, an ex accountant comic, or a chubby comic? In the end, I decided to focus on my homeland Taiwan even though the show is fronted as my personal story. I did use and package myself as the medium or the narrator to help the audience catch a deeper glimpse into my home island. But really the show is not so much just about myself but about Taiwan, directly or indirectly. At least that is my intention when I wrote the show.
I start with my personal story, then my family. Little by little, based on the past of the island and the reality Taiwan is in, I touch upon (the prospect of) wars, our colonial history, political identities, nationalism and even the island’s economic profile.
I can be quite a naughty comic when I do weekend night comedy club gigs. When needed, my dirty jokes are proper dirty. In real life, however, I am also a politics junkie and a history geek. But I face more limitations doing jokes about both at comedy clubs. An hour-long solo show and a comedy festival audience give me more room of manoeuvre, hence the decision to incorporate these elements in my show. Some timely political events (eg ex US House speaker Nancy Pelosi’s visit in Taiwan in 2022) also encouraged me to keep the political tone of the show.
This decision is also driven by the fact that Taiwan does not get talked about enough, considering the repercussion of Chinese invasion would trigger for the whole world.
The earlier iterations of this show almost felt like a TED Talk in certain parts. Often the hard facts went in the script first. With more preview shows done, ideas of matching gags appeared and I gradually edited it into a proper comedy show.
My overriding priority is to keep the show funny with a high gag rate. The hard facts or big topics only get to stay in the show if they are relevant and I manage to make them funny. Some very big topics get to stay in the show (eg colonial history of Taiwan). It was in fact quite fun as a writing challenge.
2. How does your personal journey, trading your beloved island for the British Isles, unfold in your performance, and what broader themes does it explore regarding Taiwanese identity and generational migrations?
I’d open the show with a few quick gags comparing “Chinese” and “Taiwanese”. These rely heavily on stereotypes initially and started with a predictable “them” versus “us” pattern to create comedic tension.
Gradually, I got to explain that the term “Chinese” has two main different translations in Mandarin – one is “zhong guo ren” (中國人）, which means those who are citizens of People’s Republic of China. The other translation is “hua ren”（華人）, meaning someone who is culturally Chinese. Chinese Malaysians or Singaporeans would use the second term rather than the first one, for example.
China is the one massive threat next door that no Taiwanese can escape from and one we have to learn to live with. Like what Russia is to Ukraine or Great Britain to Ireland. But it’s only after emigrating to the UK I realised I have to make this distinction. Back home, I am just Kuan-wen. There is no need to proclaim daily I am Taiwanese.
Then when I started performing, a new question appeared: do I present myself as “Chinese” comic for convenience so I could access more stereotypes, or do I state clearly I am “Taiwanese”, which the UK audience knows very little about?
Earlier versions of the show had a more substantial section comparing my paternal grandmother, my mother and myself to illustrate this point.* As the show progressed and I included more jokes from timely political events and my difficult relationship with my mother, this section became more concise. The show allows the audience to understand that Taiwanese political identity is a moving concept and a work in progress.
* To give you the details, my grandma was raised in the Japanese colonial era. She considered herself Taiwanese first and to an extent Japanese. But she would not think of herself as Chinese. She also spoke fluent Japanese but not Mandarin Chinese.
My mother was raised in the era of dictatorship when the island was ruled by the Chinese Nationalist government. She thought of herself as Chinese and Taiwanese.
I grew up with the democratisation of Taiwan. I consider myself Taiwanese. Maybe culturally Chinese, but not politically.
3. With features on BBC Radio 4, BBC Three, and Comedy Central, how has your exposure to these platforms influenced your debut hour, and what do you hope audiences take away from your unique perspective?
Through these prior works, I feel there is sometimes a very specific set of frames/expectations placed on East Asian performers before we even speak. As in, the non Asian producers/editors expect to see East Asian performers within the confines of what they think East Asian people are like and what we should be talking about. When we don’t, our jokes or our shows interest them less.
But I have to say that sometimes, East Asian performers do not help either. We also reinforce the stereotypes. I will put my hands up as I also use those stereotypes sometimes at the start of my comedy sets just to survive some raucous club nights.
To give you an example, the first clip I did for Comedy Central Live contained two elements. One gag is on the stereotype of East Asians seemingly never ageing. The other covers anti-vaxx sentiments by certain segment of the queer community. When the clip was uploaded, the whole second section was gone. Only the first bit on East Asians not ageing was kept in.
It could be that the producer thought viewers are tired of talks about vaccines. It could be that they consider the gags too vulgar. But part of me also wondered – is it because if people see me as East Asian, then it’s better to just show me talking about being East Asian.
I also notice a lot of narratives by East Asian comedians tend to come from performers who are second generation East Asians – they are descendants of immigrants. Their views are without a doubt valid, but there are differences between their experiences and mine, as I was not born in the UK and only moved here in my adulthood. But for the Western audience, they tend to think comedy told by second generation Asians represents all of us.
Take fortune cookies for example, it is an invention by overseas Chinese immigrants. You don’t see it in Asia; you only see it in Chinatowns in Western countries. When I talk about East Asian cultures, I would not bring fortune cookies in.
Another example is the BBC Radio 4 sketch comedy I did, in which I was a voice actor. In one sketch, the writer mocked Chinese dessert with red beans as disgusting. I remember thinking, “no they are not. They are just different. You simply did not grow up having those as your default dessert option.”
Both experiences prompt me to really ponder how I should position myself in my solo show. Not wanting to conform to these, I wrote a show about Taiwan and about me being Taiwanese in the end. Since the audience generally knows very little about my country, I had to be very specific but I get should construct my own frames.
4.How do you strike a balance between humor and more serious reflections on stage?
My view on this is constantly shifting. For now, my guiding principle is whether at the end of the show the audience finds the tone of the show preachy. If they do, then I’ve failed in my job. I could include serious stuff in my show, but I still need to win some of them over because this might be my only chance to impress them.
(For comedians who have found their audience, it’s the converted coming to be preached at so the principle has got to be somewhat different!)
If I have something to say, there are different art forms and different ways of communication I could have chosen instead of comedy. When I perform a comedy show, I hope the audience find the show first and foremost funny. If some of them also think they learned a lot of new things from the show – that’s just gravy. But this is only the secondary goal.
The balance between humour and serious reflections for me is to find what’s “human” in the serious stuff. So when I talk about wars, I talk about my femininity not fitting the macho vibe in the army, the selfishness of people wanting to escape conscription or the petty examples of Taiwanese patriotism.
I also did not fuse a lot of opinions into this particular show apart from “… when China invades Taiwan, you guys need to save us”. (And I really mean it!) So “more serious reflections” in this show are mostly hard facts. I try not to leave the hard facts in isolation but rather use them to amp up the jokes. They could be part of the narrative for my own funny anecdotes. I also like comedic effect of unexpected juxtapositions – comparing colonial histories to a gay orgy party for example. But who knows if I manage to strike a fine balance? You will have to come to my show to find out!
Get your tickets here: https://sohotheatre.com/events/kuan-wen-huang-ilha-formosa/