Fill the gap with a smile
Xiao Jia repeated the hypoxia of the brain at birth fifty or sixty times in front of the microphone, and he could make the audience laugh every time.
Xiao Jia, whose real name is Zhang Jiaxin, is 27 years old and is a talk show actor.
When telling a paragraph, his facial features are pulled back and forth, and his speech rate is slower than that of ordinary people. It seems that every word has to be rolled around in the throat before it can be spit out.
He was shaking his baggage as if he was acting like a baby, but the audience in the audience was "poked" and they laughed staggeringly.
He said: "When I was young, everyone laughed at me, but it's not funny. That's the biggest flaw of talk show actors."
In the fourth season of the variety show "Talk Show", Xiao Jia won the first vote of the judges by teasing her own length and short feet: "When I was two or three years old, I saw people walking with two feet. With sympathetic eyes, he thought to himself, he is so pitiful, his feet are all on the ground." He also talked about school violence and physical discrimination, and he grinned unconsciously with the audience.
The guest on the show praised him "You laughed me to death".
On the talk show stage, the only criterion for evaluating actors is whether they are funny or not.
Among the actors who were on stage with Xiao Jia, some ridiculed their ugliness to win their love, while others complained that they were handsome but were eliminated.
A netizen commented after watching the show, “After watching Jiang Zihao and Xu Zhisheng, I feel that there is still some advantage in appearance, but in the talk show industry (the advantages and disadvantages of beauty and ugliness), the reverse is necessary."
In 2018, there were no more than 10 talk shows a week in Beijing. Today, there are more than a dozen clubs selling tickets publicly in Beijing, and one club has 10 performances a week.
On the stage of the "Laifeng Comedy Club" in Xiamen where Xiao Jia is located, there are high school students, seniors in their 60s, pregnant women, and girls with shaved heads due to alopecia areata. They use talk shows to interpret their lives.
This interpretation is a two-way healing process.
Xiao Jia hopes that those who have bullied him can sit down the stage and laugh when he hears his jokes.
"That's a chance to prove myself. Talk show actors want to make the audience laugh. They laugh, it means I succeeded."
A desire to survive in the "gray days"
The open wheat stage is almost the first stop for all talk show lovers. There is no compensation, but anyone can go on it.
In May last year, Xiao Jia went to open wheat for the first time. The bright light dazzled him, and he could only see the first row of audiences.
Someone in the audience talked in low voices and someone swiped their mobile phones. As soon as the performance started, thirty or forty pairs of eyes were staring at him.
That was the gaze he would often meet on the road, but passers-by just glanced at it quickly, while the audience watched for a long time.
He felt terrified.
Xiaojia has not dared to speak in public since she was a child.
The first time I officially came to power, I just entered a junior college, and I introduced myself in the class at the beginning of semester.
His body and voice were trembling, and he hurriedly stepped down after only a few words.
When he was a child, he loved to stay at home reading books and watching variety shows, "can lie down without sitting".
Staying away from the hustle and bustle can save him some trouble.
For example, he remembers that when he was in elementary school, he was surrounded by a group of classmates. He was kicked from get out of class to class. After 10 minutes, his clothes were already covered with footprints.
He is used to expressing delicate emotions silently.
Because he couldn't hold a pen well, he couldn't finish writing every Chinese composition since middle school.
But he loves to write, and he can see his short essays in every issue of the high school newspaper.
He desires to have a sense of existence, is used to taking care of his friends' feelings and hiding his feelings, and hopes that his friends "can think of me when they are sad."
After earning income, he will send flowers to his friends every Valentine's Day, one in the first year and two in the second year, increasing year by year, "They are willing to be friends with me, it is my blessing, I am willing to take all my things give them".
But he rarely expresses his desire to be noticed.
In 2020, he was operating a new media company in a hotel company in Xiamen. The employees of the company would receive greetings in the work group on their birthdays, but he was missed.
On his birthday, he frequently checked the messages on his mobile phone. From day to night, no one remembered, but he didn't say anything.
At the beginning of 2020, Xiaojia prepared a program for the company's annual meeting.
He doesn't have much talent, he just thinks that the talk show is like "talking and acting".
He had consulted Lucy, the director of Xiamen Laifeng Comedy Club, for advice, but he didn't have a deep conversation.
At the annual meeting, he shuddered and finished the speech. The colleagues in the audience were all eating, and no one listened carefully.
With the adjustment of the epidemic prevention policy, the Xiamen theater was unblocked, and the club was short of people to perform, so Xiao Jia was invited to board the open wheat stage.
Lucy remembers that Xiao Jia once said that she didn't know what to say, so she sent him a video of Drew Lynch.
The American talk show actor has a stuttering problem, but those stuttering pauses add to the suspense and tension of the story.
During the performance, Lynch will not be affected by the jam from time to time, the golden sentences are frequently produced, and there are always cheers on the scene.
After reading it, Xiao Jia wanted to "get out of her comfort zone" for the first time.
When she was on stage, Xiao Jia still couldn't stop shaking, her brain was blank.
He tentatively threw out the first stalk. Someone laughed. Then he went on and felt "applause coming from his face."
"You can feel that they like you from the bottom of their hearts." Xiao Jia recalled.
That was the first time that laughter brought him a sense of security, and he was "suddenly addicted".
For Wang Zihan, the talk show made her want to survive in the "gray days".
In February 2018, she was about to graduate from Peking University. When she participated in a campus project of a comedy industry company, she first encountered a talk show.
At that time, she hadn't found her future direction, arguing with her family about whether to work or continue to study, and fell into a severe depression without knowing it.
She described that "however it was wrong to live" and "just want to say something irresponsible to strangers".
She huddled in a dimly lit rental room on the first floor. She didn't want to eat or talk. She only retained the hobby of going on stage to talk about talk shows.
Only a talk show can pull her up from the bed, "Only the five or six minutes standing on the stage is a person."
When talking about the talk show at the beginning, Wang Zihan didn't have any skills and talked about the loneliness and confusion in life.
Once on the way to talk about Kai Mai, she sprained both feet because of a trance and a small bus accident.
At that moment she thought, "If you die in this place today, it would be pretty cool." She endured the pain and went to the show. She talked about the various thoughts in her mind at the moment of the accident. It was very sad, but the audience laughed.
Those laughter are her emotional outlets, "Everyone is listening to you very seriously, but they don't really care about you, and they won't be emotionally burdened because of your words."
She decided to talk about the talk show.
A year later, Wang Zihan became a talk show actor and trainer.
She has seen people who try to talk about talk shows with various purposes. "Many people think that the sense of accomplishment of talk shows is easy to get, and this identity is also very cool, but when they find that it’s not that simple, the enthusiasm will immediately cool down. "Many people in the industry said that among talk show fans, less than 10% of them can move from the open microphone to the commercial stage, using talk shows as a way to gain income.
Wang Zihan relies on tenacity.
"I have no talent for this." She claims that every stalk is built brick by brick. "There has never been that kind of inspiration like being struck by lightning." The story will be constantly changed from conception to formation, she I can throw away 9,000-word jokes in half a year, and some jokes have to be changed for more than two years.
Xiao Jia thinks she is lucky.
He felt that it was not easy for the audience to watch him speak, and had relatively low expectations of him, so he would be pleasantly surprised when the stalk came out.
Because of the better performance, he got commercial performance opportunities after 7 times of open wheat, and it will take three to four months or even longer for more people.
Before the first commercial performance, he designed a T-shirt with his emoticon pack printed on it. He couldn't sleep for 3 consecutive days. His mind was filled with jokes that he had told dozens of times, and he repeatedly recalled the audience's on-site feedback.
Xiao Jia lives in Qianpu Village, the largest urban village in Xiamen.
In the 18-square-meter rental house, he slowly tapped the keyboard with his strong left hand, and the tortoise, who had been raising for three years, accompanied him.
He remembers the inspirations that suddenly appear in his life in his mobile phone, and watching the news will also be substituted into the situation of the person concerned, thinking about the possibility of creation.
"The story tells of the tortoise and the hare race, the tortoise won, but in reality the tortoise is motionless, you have to say later, let me crawl." He used to mock the "tortoise and the hare race" in reality, ridiculous, used to Be cautious of your luck.
He had just finished recording the show, and he didn't have time to think about whether he would be popular. The first reaction was to write a new work and ask the teacher of the club to help him read the new manuscript. .
The audience saw his relief, and laughter came earlier
Mary Beard, professor of classical studies at the University of Cambridge, concluded in "Three Theories of Laughter" that there are generally three ways to make people laugh: anticipation violation, superiority, and pressure release.
Sincere expressions can increase the surprise, stir the emotions of the audience back and forth, and make the sudden stalks more funny.
Wang Zihan just started talking about talk shows. Friends described her as "a sophisticated clock", with smooth connections between her paragraphs, full of emotions, and strict performance in accordance with the stage, "the audience will not laugh and will not affect my performance."
Colleagues suggested that she design a few forgotten words without even speaking Mandarin so standard.
She slowly opened herself to the audience, showing her fragility.
"You can't fool the audience. When they feel that you are sincere, they will laugh where you find it funny. They don't care if you accidentally act the wrong way or the microphone stand is down. Everything is part of the show." The stage was too big and too far away from the audience. She tried to sit on the edge of the stage, her legs slumped casually, and the audience's expression became much more natural.
Li Dan, a comedian who has been in business for almost 10 years, said in an interview that he was "joking nine minutes of truth." Sword, put a sheath on it and show it to everyone."
Xiao Jia has always wanted to include her physical defects in her jokes, but she was worried that the audience would not want to watch it.
At the end of 2020, comedian Cheng Lu told him that if the body defect was not explained clearly at the beginning, the audience would not dare to laugh.
Xiao Jia began to try to speak her heart to the audience and take the audience back to the scene she had experienced.
The audience saw his relief, and laughter came earlier.
After attending the training camp, Xiao Jia decided to quit her job in new media operations and perform a talk show full-time.
Among the part-time commercial talk show actors, only about 20%-30% will become full-time talk show actors.
In the beginning, Xiaojia's income was unstable. She only earned more than 1,000 yuan a month from performances, and she had to rely on the new media operations of the part-time club to make ends meet.
"It's also a lot of mental consumption." I don't have time to work out, and my abdominal muscles are gone.
But he never regretted it. The talk show gave him access to the "broader world."
In polishing his jokes and talking to the audience, he constantly reconciled his body defects.
Beginning to write stories using personal experience, he learned to ask himself at the time from the perspective of a bystander: "If there were no restrictions at that moment, what would I do?" Once he just sat down on the bus and the people beside him Stand up and walk away from a few seats, but not to get off.
In the show, he pretended to be fierce with a voice that was not loud enough, and borrowed a paragraph to say to those who stood up, what he wanted to say but never said: "You sit down for me."
He didn't want to be labeled "different" since he was a child.
He worked hard to be a good student and never used his parents to supervise his homework. A teacher's praise can heal most of his injuries from campus bullying.
The junior high school head teacher voluntarily nominated him when he was running for class leader. He still remembers the feeling of being valued, "she saw my ability."
During the college entrance examination, someone suggested that he should learn about the bonus points policy. He was unwilling and felt that it was a differential treatment.
As a result, he didn't finish writing the Chinese and the comprehensive examination papers.
To make matters worse, his words are crooked and crooked, and it is estimated that "the college entrance examination reform teacher will not be as careful as the teacher in this school."
Finally, he went to a college.
The bystander's perspective during the creation also made Xiao Jia discover that sometimes he was in this society because he was too sensitive and enlarged details that had no special meaning.
He analyzed himself, and other passengers on the bus walked away, and may not have targeted him. It was he who put himself in a "special" position that made him feel sad.
Wang Zihan believes that the process of digesting personal experience with paragraphs is part of "God's perspective" plus part of "psychological activity."
The creator's attention will be focused on the matter itself, thinking about more accurate expressions and more absurd effects.
She plans to talk about severe depression, her native family, the psychological gap after graduating from Peking University, and the changes in sexual orientation in the special session. The truth behind these topics has brought her pain.
"When I first wanted to talk about it, it was actually when I had the most expressive desires. I haven't fully reconciled. You will achieve real reconciliation in the process of repeating and trying again and again. When the stage presentation of this paragraph reaches its best You must be completely reconciled when you are in the same state."
At the beginning, she said in the story that she tried to commit suicide once, and took all the sleeping pills. After washing her stomach, her mother was worried about what she would eat next time she suffers from insomnia.
She wanted to show her mother's extreme rationality, but the audience couldn't laugh.
In Wang Zihan's memory, the mother's emotions are always restrained, and the child does not cry and does not make sense until the crying is over.
Once when she chatted with her mother, she happened to find that her mother remembered a "little thing that hurt me".
"My mother said that she had always been lucky, and hoped that I had forgotten it. She felt that she shouldn't, and she apologized to me, but she was experiencing many other things at the time." Wang Zihan realized that her mother has more than just the identity of a mother. , She is burdened with troubles from all sides.
After the diagnosis of major depression, Wang Zihan will receive regular psychological consultation.
A psychologist once told her that the process of writing a paragraph is very similar to writing a psychological emotional diary, that is, patients write down their daily emotions, including events, feelings, and various psychological activities. "Writing down is the first step in self-explaining." In the process of writing a paragraph, we will constantly ask ourselves what we were thinking and how we felt at the time. Although these things may not always be present in the paragraph, you must not be able to avoid it when writing. It's open."
Wang Zihan learned to release his suppressed emotions in this kind of self-analysis.
It turns out that she always feels that everyone is staring at her, and when you are in love, you must ensure that there is no moral stain when you break up.
After talking about the talk show, she began to respect emotions.
Some people questioned why she could do the opening show for the big coffee. She directly said: "Have you seen me perform? If you haven't, go and watch it. If you still think I don't deserve it, you can treat me as something." Communication is likened to open-mindedness, "You always have to try it as you wish, and you can do it, not even if it doesn't."
Although Xiaojia still has "social phobia", she will push away parties that are mostly strangers. When doing business in a foreign country, rather than having a supper with strange actors, she prefers to eat takeaway at the hotel.
But on the stage, he began to talk about what he always wanted to say, and be "friends for an hour and a half" with his unfamiliar counterparts during the performance.
He also became more and more confident. He took off his low-down hat during the performance, and occasionally "choked people" in group chats with friends, instead of just going around his friends.
"Because it's not funny, comedians are needed"
Freshman Xu Jin started watching "Talk Show Conference" from high school.
This year, she saw Xiao Jia's performance and remembered her experience of being bullied on campus.
When Xu Jin was in junior high school, seven or eight girls blocked her into the toilet and poured water on her.
Xiaojia's jokes opened a mouth in her heart, and part of the backlog of anger and fear was vented, but the imprint of emotions will always be there.
"Xiaojia obviously smiled, but I can't do it." She hopes that more people who are experiencing campus bullying can see, "You are not alone. You can make yourself stronger in another way."
Xiao Jia believes that the audience's resonance comes from the "consensus on the B-side of life". His negative emotions are packaged in jokes, and when they touch the audience's negative emotions, the pain is eliminated together.
Lin Xi, a 28-year-old teacher, would sit on the balcony and watch the talk show on her mobile phone when she was unable to talk about negative emotions.
Few of her friends responded to her complaints, and some replied "you are used to it".
She began to get used to digesting her emotions alone, "turning the external release to silent".
A certain point of view output by the talk show actor will let her see another perspective to solve the problem.
She used to pay more in a certain relationship. She saw Yang Li say in a performance, "Males are the same as females when they are unreasonable." It is necessary to lower your profile for the sake of others".
Later, when she was in a bad mood, she would almost always watch a talk show first, calm down and then reflect on herself.
Talking about love troubles with friends, she also learned to joke with herself.
Seeing that she was not so serious, her friends had more comforting words.
Xu Jin thinks, “Talk show is not a very elegant art, it's just a picture of music.” More often, the audience longs for the emotional vent at the moment of laughter.
She confessed that she "has no brains" when watching the performance and wants to follow the actors' emotions.
I started watching the talk show because I heard from my classmates that there was an actor named Pang Bo who was very handsome.
Wang Zihan discovered during performances that over the years, most domestic audiences still like "stalks to the mouth" and are unwilling to invest too much attention or memory cost when watching programs.
Wang Zihan summed up based on experience: "Many times when you talk about something a little bit deeper or a little bit around, everyone is a little reluctant to follow it, especially if there are no subtitles offline."
For example, Niaoniao, a contestant who participated in the "Talk Show" program, is good at designing jokes that need to be pondered by the audience.
When talking about facial anxiety, she said, "When can I get some things that show personality and do not involve beauty or ugliness, such as fingerprints".
Wang Zihan remembered that many audiences didn't respond to Niaoniao's talk about this when performing offline.
Under the topic of "The Unique Charm of Talk Shows" on Douban, most of the topics that netizens want to see are related to daily life, including regions, workplaces, marriages, and so on.
In the fourth season of "Talk Show", contestants also focused more on common and "safe" topics such as "appearance anxiety", "male-female relations", and "urban life". Popularity and low barriers to understanding are the first choice, because one sentence Slightly "extraordinary" stems may bring subtle differences in individual feelings.
As an audience member, Xu Jin cannot accept Niaoniao teasing extroverts, saying that "happy people are also going to die."
Because she often went to the hospital when she was sick, this stalk reminded her of patients in the emergency room who were pushed to the operating room.
"The audience watched this to be happy. This kind of thing was said on the stage and it was an offense to people who are serious about their lives."
Heavier topics test the actor's and audience's understanding of humor.
In a talk show theme contest "It’s okay, I’m sick too", player Rock teased his depression: "Sometimes I can only lie down and don’t want to do anything, so it seems that I’m lazy, but I’m a lazy person. There was a smile on my face when I was standing." The laughter in the audience was very sparse, and after a while, someone applauded.
Xu Zhisheng talked about red-green blindness, Niaoniao talked about facial anxiety, Rock was eliminated by the two.
Some netizens commented on Rock, "He shared something that he hasn't digested and is bloody."
At the beginning of this year, the tortoise who had accompanied Xiaojia for three years died.
He thought of his father who died of a sudden myocardial infarction in 2019, and wanted to commemorate him with a talk show.
My father is a serious and introverted person, "it is difficult to communicate, and he would beat me when I was young."
But when Xiao Jia is bullied by classmates, his father will go to school to seek justice for his son.
When a friend comes to play at home, he will give Xiao Jia some money and ask his son to take his friend to eat steak.
After Xiaojia left Zhangzhou to work in Xiamen, his father became an old child and needed to be coaxed from time to time. A few months before his death, he always sent messages to ask Xiao Jia, "What is my son doing?" "It's okay, I just miss you."
Xiao Jia rubbed the trivial thoughts into the paragraph and spent two nights writing them out, imagining how his father would receive the thoughts of his family in another world.
This year's Ching Ming Festival, he posted the video of the live performance on Weibo and Station B to easily tell the truth of his father's death.
"My mother called me and said that my dad was dying, and I said,'Where is my dad?'" There was a barrage drifting by, "I can't laugh." Someone sent a private message to him and said that this was an offense to the deceased.
Wang Zihan knows that domestic audiences are not very receptive to such topics. She also talks about her own depression. She will first point out the current high incidence of depression, relax the audience’s vigilance, and then bypass the heaviest part. Adding a click is fictitious content, making it difficult for the audience to distinguish the truth of the pain.
When talking about parent-child relationship, she will increase the mother's perspective, "and let everyone see a little hope, don't draw a full stop too early."
Xiaojia said in the show "There is nothing to joke about", but he explained that the joke is based on being able to give a solution.
He doesn't have a good solution for some topics, "For example, cancer, I don't have the right to speak, and it will be very boring to tease."
"With skill and personality charm, everything can be funny." Wang Zihan likened the stories and opinions in the paragraph to the developer. The important thing is to show the person who tells the story. Way".
Xiaojia’s idol and American talk show actor Joan Rivers was once in debt with tens of millions of dollars and her husband committed suicide, but she was still able to tease life on stage when she was in her 70s.
Joan Rivers was once asked by an audience member that there was something she couldn't laugh at.
She said that after her husband committed suicide, her daughter was utterly unsettled all day long.
Once she took her daughter to a high-end restaurant for dinner. She looked at the menu and said, if your father is still alive and seeing the price of these dishes, he will commit suicide again. The daughter laughed for the first time.
"I brought my daughter back with a smile." She recalled with tears.
Wang Zihan said that every mature actor has a few "particularly cruel and heavy" jokes in his hands, which are usually shaken out at the end of the show.
She still can't fully control the topics of depression, native family, and sexual orientation, but she doesn't want to wait, "Because this is not funny, comedians are needed".
When posting the video to commemorate his father, Xiao Jia wrote: “When I wrote (this paragraph), I also expected that it might not be funny and would scare the audience. But my father had a good time in my text. At the end of the video, Xiao Jia almost jumped up on the stage because he was so happy, because he felt like "Dad came to see me" in the audience's laughter.
He thought that his father always felt that his son was not confident enough before, and he should be quite satisfied at the moment.
(At the request of the interviewee, Xu Jin and Lin Xi are both pseudonyms)
China Youth Daily·China Youth Daily reporter Jiao Jingxian Source: China Youth Daily
September 01, 2021 06 Edition