FOR most Western-educated expatriates in China, this seems a mission impossible: earning a living by performing the most linguistically challenging stand-up comedy routines in flawless Chinese with genuine humor.

    But Mark Rowswell, a Canadian widely known by his stage name Dashan in China, has succeeded more than once. In the past 30 years, he has built up an enduring career by accurately tickling the funny bones of Chinese audiences.

    Often dubbed as China’s “most famous foreigner,” Dashan is admired for his impeccable grasp of the Chinese language. Now, after three decades of extraordinary feats in China as a cross-talk performer, TV presenter, drama actor, and cultural ambassador, the 49-year-old is using his linguistic weapon of Mandarin to conquer a new realm — creating his own brand of stand-up comedy for Chinese audiences.

    “Stand-up comedy is quite young in China, and the audiences are always young people. This gives me a sense of vigor and vitality,” Dashan said in an interview with Xinhua after meeting his fans at Cambridge University last week.

    “Now, stand-up comedy is developing in China. For me, this is a kind of innovation that solves many of my problems with doing comedy,” he added.

    Compared to traditional Chinese cross-talk, which often requires fixed dramatic structure and format, stand-up comedy is more loosely organized in structure and content, thus making it easier for artists to conceive and compose, the performer noted.

    “Stand-up comedy is more reflective of a combination of Eastern and Western cultures, and this suits me better,” the Canadian continued.

    This is not his first voyage into China’s comic world. In the 1980s, when he was still an international student at Peking University, he was already a celebrity expatriate in the country, famed for his humor and skills of performing local Chinese cross-talk.

    At the age of 23, Dashan came to China as an overseas student at Peking University in 1988, after earning a bachelor’s degree in Chinese studies from the University of Toronto.

    Shortly after his arrival in China, he was invited to perform in a comedy skit for the New Year Gala, which is an annual broadcast by China Central Television (CCTV) to an audience of nearly 550 million people.

    The performance made him an instant celebrity in China, and since then Dashan has become a household name in the country. Tens of millions of Chinese were stunned by his fluency in Mandarin and his shrewd mastery of Chinese humor.

    So far, Dashan has already experimented with a number of stand-up comedy shows in China, often performing for young audiences in theater-style venues rather than in front of TV cameras.

    “Now, I hope to jump out of the media and interact with audiences directly. This feels more spontaneous and more real,” he explained.

    Invited by the Chinese Students and Scholars Association in Cambridge, Dashan staged his first stand-up bits in Britain last Sunday, poking fun at his experiences of learning languages and culture shocks in the East and West.

    His British debut featured a myriad of hilarious, semi-fictional anecdotes, such as how he had been mistaken for a foreign spy and how he became interested in learning Chinese while working at a local restaurant in Canada.

    Unsurprisingly, the show won cheers and applause from hundreds of his fans in Britain, many of whom traveled all the way from London, Manchester and Wales to see him.

    “For a performer, I sometimes find it easy to satisfy the audience, but difficult to satisfy myself. I don’t want to repeat myself, so I am trying to do something more fulfilling for me,” the comedian said.(Xinhua)