I first encountered Zhang Boxin, like a lot of viewers, through the comedy competition Xiangsheng You Xinren. What stayed with me was not a routine but the awkwardness of his “I concede” moment. Set beside some of the program’s formulaic husband-and-wife crosstalk, it did not feel like a different species of discomfort.
Later, after he founded Gaoxing She, I watched a few of his pieces. The issues were hard to miss.
First, the jokes feel old. Whether in Gaoxing She performances or in sketches posted on his personal account, I struggle to find the punchlines. There are setups, gestures, pauses—but few moments that land as laughs.
Second, he pushes too hard. His physical movements and facial expressions—raised eyebrows, widened eyes—are exaggerated enough to pull me out of the scene. Crosstalk depends on a kind of control: the performer can be animated, but the audience should still believe the person onstage. When the effort is visible, the joke often isn’t.
What surprised me more was an interview in which he said that crosstalk is art, not something meant simply to make you laugh. Of course laughter is not the whole of crosstalk. But Guo Degang’s line cuts to the point: if crosstalk isn’t funny, that’s the real joke. Two performers can spend twenty minutes onstage; if the audience never laughs once, calling it crosstalk becomes a stretch.
I think there are two possible reasons he stresses that crosstalk “isn’t about getting a laugh.” One is that his writing has not yet reached the level where every laugh is carefully engineered. The other is that he may be deliberately saying something that sounds clear-eyed but is actually lopsided, in order to create discussion and draw traffic.
I still come across clips of his livestreams now and then, and his views and manner seem unchanged. If I could offer him a word of advice, it would be this: he is no longer young. If tickets are genuinely hard to sell, he might be better off quietly writing a few strong routines or teaching students properly. After all, he does have a real foundation in crosstalk.