Time reading SHECKYmagazine?

by Brian McKim & Traci Skene on November 16th, 2007

Time magazine has a piece about the burgeoning comedy scene in Hong Kong (“How to Write a Joke in China”). Jamie Gong, “was always struck by the rarity of an Asian-American comedian,” so when he moved recently to Hong Kong, he was struck by the rarity of comedy clubs in Asia. He started the TakeOut Comedy Shop.

Comedy works for both camps as a form of therapy to bridge Hong Kong’s unique cultural gap, which, together with its everyday chaos, creates plenty of material. “The city’s hungry for this,” Gong says. “I know comedians in New York who’d kill for this kind of a crowd.” And the crowd is growing: Three of the four shows comprising the Hong Kong’s Funniest Person Contest sold out in advance.

SHECKYmagazine readers will recall that our own Paul Ogata wrote about his experience with Gong and Hong Kong back on September 12 of this year.

It was while performing in Hong Kong with TakeOut Comedy that I was witness to Jami Gong hatching his master plan for getting into the hugest untapped market of them all… China. The plan was simple, really: bring American-style stand-up comedy to the 1.3 billion Chinese. Except that it was pretty much a foreign concept there, since there was only one club which brought in comics from the West. And that was only once a month. No, to operate full-time, Gong realized he needed to have a stable of local comedians. (It turns out that airfare to Hong Kong from the US is a little pricey.)

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