When I was a kid, there wasn’t much in the way of entertainment, and the thing I loved most was watching Niu Qun and Feng Gong perform crosstalk on TV. At some point my family got hold of a cassette of crosstalk routines from who knows where, and I played it over and over without getting tired of it. I enjoyed every beat of it—the setups, the turns, the rhythm of the jokes.
Later, when I grew up and information became easy to access, I listened to crosstalk much less often. The few times I did, it didn’t leave much of an impression.
This time was my first time seeing crosstalk in a theater. It was the first time I had watched the performers up close, in person. But honestly, in terms of the actual effect, it didn’t feel much different from watching through a screen on TV or on a computer. I didn’t feel that it was more real or that the experience was necessarily better. The biggest difference was simply that there was no fast-forward button.
It was also the first time in my life that I sat there obediently for two full hours and listened to an entire crosstalk performance from beginning to end. Afterward, these were my impressions:
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Whether crosstalk works mostly depends on the material. The performers all seemed to have solid fundamentals, and their stage skills did not feel dramatically different from one another. In the end, the script matters most.
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A lot of people can perform crosstalk, just like a lot of people can sing, but very few actually become popular. What really makes the difference is creative ability. Someone like Jay Chou has stayed successful for so many years because he can keep producing new work nonstop.
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Audiences today are harder to make laugh. Living online means being exposed to all kinds of information and humor all the time, so people’s standards for what counts as funny have been trained upward. Many of the punchlines in crosstalk now feel obviously too shallow to get a real laugh.
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Some routines rely on humiliating someone for laughs, and I find that uncomfortable. Since the audience obviously can’t be the target, the teasing usually falls on the supporting performer. Even if that person is willing to play along, it still doesn’t sit well with me.
Compared with crosstalk, I liked the plot-driven stage play I saw last time much more.