“Normal confident guys”: Chinese female stand-up comedians performing, triggering, and commercializing the “female complaint”

ABSTRACT

In the fast-evolving global context of audiovisual streaming services, stand-up comedy shows, such as Rock & Roast, have become a popular medium for articulating, expressing, and critiquing significant social-cultural concerns in China. This article examines how Chinese female stand-up comedians enact, activate, and monetize the “female complaint,” originally theorized by Lauren Berlant, suggests that women’s experiences are often marked by a pursuit of love that proves to be both demanding and unrewarding. We contend that in the Chinese context, female stand-up comedians have devised ways to express soft, safe, and marketable “female complaints” that align with their goals of profitable performances and adherence to the Communist Party’s standards of positive energy. As such, the article enriches Berlant’s theory of the female complaint by infusing it with a global perspective, exploring new mediums of expression (stand-up comedy), highlighting the interplay with political and economic dynamics, and situating it within the specific cultural and feminist context of China.

KEYWORDS:

• Stand-up comedy
• female complaint
• made-in-China feminism
• #MeToo
• reality shows

Acknowledgements

We would like to thank Wenxin Ji for her assistance with the collection and transcription of videos featuring female stand-up comedians for our study.

Disclosure statement

No potential conflict of interest was reported by the author(s).

Notes

1. See details on https://www.bbc.com/news/world-asia-china-55744860, visited on 17th August, 2021.

2. For details, see Yang, L. (2020). I make you laugh, so don't bother but what I say. https://www.infzm.com/contents/192455; Renwu, (2020). A twin's world of stand-up comedy. https://mp.weixin.qq.com/s/vGNpLMJVOALrdLMn7lrglQ; Mao, L. (2020). Female stand-up comedian: Different worlds online and offline. https://finance.sina.com.cn/tech/2020-10-18/doc-iiznezxr6614973.shtml; Norah. (2021). Probably the worst sounding podcast ever, but I had a good chat with Norah. https://posts.careerengine.us/p/60c497ad146cd576dec2fef8

3. For details, see the China Internet Advertising Data Report 2020 on http://world.people.com.cn/n1/2021/0112/c1002-31997483.html

4. We conducted this search on 27th, September, 2021, via https://www.baidu.com/

5. See https://baike.baidu.com/item/%E6%99%AE%E4%BF%A1%E7%94%B7/58115631?fr=aladdin

6. WeChat Moment (peng you quan) is a function of the mobile application WeChat that enables users to share and access information about their approved WeChat friends, which creates an intimate and private communication circle.

7. See https://www.douban.com/note/781121784/

Additional information

Funding

The work was supported by the The Philosophy and Social Science Foundation of Guangdong Province of China [GD22YXW03]; The Shanghai Philosophy and Social Science Foundation [2021ZXW002].