Des Bishop Does Viral Comedy, in Chinese
If you’ve ever lived abroad, the comedy of globe-trotting Desmond ‘Des’ Bishop will strike a chord. Despite having the perhaps the blackest sounding name in comedy, Bishop looks like John Slattery from Mad Men, and talks with a Queens NY accent, in an Irish cadence.
Bishop was born in Queens, but moved to Cork Ireland as a teenager, before living and working abroad in China. His standup clips have gone globally viral on TikTok, with stories about learning Mandarin in Beijing or of his days working in a Chinese restaurant, and doing standup in China are simply hilarious. For anyone who has lived in another country or spent the time to learn a new language, his jokes hit home.
He has a bit about mistakenly, and repeatedly, calling himself a C*** in China, which as you might imagine is hysterical. And although the payoff is a bit off-color, his setups are intelligent and well crafted, Bishop manages to explain the difficulties in the tonal nature of the Mandarin language, without boring anyone, before landing his punchlines to uproarious applause.
It being San Francisco, there were several Chinese speakers in the audience at Cobb’s Comedy Club, who may have been there to hear him work Mandarin into his bits, and he did not disappoint, he did crowdwork in Chinese. There were some of his Irish fans in the audience who peppered him with questions about an Irish TV show he did in Gaelic back in the day.
Now, it being San Francisco, the audience was also ready to ‘boo’ any premise that stabs fun at progressive ideals, and in that, we did not disappoint either. And Bishop took that in stride, like water off a Peking duck’s back, Bishop seemed to adjust his set accordingly, on the fly as a veteran standup who has played to crowds all over the world. And there were no more groans from the crowd after that.
I lived and went to the same University in Ireland as Des, (University College Cork) and I got to ask him a couple questions after his sold-out show in San Francisco.
BAS: Where was your first set, and how did it go?
Des Bishop: “My first set was in Cork, Ireland back in 1997. The unique thing about it was that there wasn’t really a scene in Cork so there was no sense of open mics or anything like that. So they just booked me to open and do 20 mins. I had a great time and I think there was a good 5 in there but I don’t know how the audience tolerated me for some of it. It was an incredible feeling but I think a lot of audience goodwill got me over the line for a lot of it.”
How is Chinese comedy different from American comedy?
“That’s always a hard one to answer because I don’t really believe in one place having a type of comedy over another. I feel it is more about what they are exposed to. When I was there they were very open to my freestyling western style stand up. Traditionally they have had more structured double act comedy called Xiangsheng that is best compared to Abbot and Costello maybe but they also have had some great sketch comedy for decades that isn’t that different from SNL (censorship aside of course.)”
Is there anything funny about San Francisco?
“I am not the best person to ask about that because I have never been in SF until yesterday. When I did the show last night I did notice more applause breaks for my more liberal bits which definitely played into a stereotype.”
What’s your favorite comedy podcast right now?
What’s coming up for you?
Touring like a lunatic!!!!
Bishop has rereleased his his special ‘Of All People’ with 800 Pound Gorilla Media this week, because although his clips have been seen hundreds of millions of times on social media, the hour long set deserves to be seen as a whole:
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