Inside a sweaty sports bar in Ho Chi Minh City, Vietnamese comedian Uy Le bombards a sleepy crowd of local teenyboppers and Western expats with a flurry of quantum physics and game-theory wisecracks in English — you know, “relatable” jokes. Then he moves on to raunchier, more third-rail material: awkward first dates, obeying Mom and, gasp, playing hooky from work. His oversize spectacles creep down his nose as he delivers the punch line: “I wasn’t even sick!” He snickers — at his own joke — as the audience giggles quietly.
Welcome to a new breed of buttoned-up humor in Vietnam’s blossoming stand-up comedy scene, where political correctness, subtlety and, er, geeky science jokes fly freely. Granted, the material may not sound exactly edgy to Western ears accustomed to racier material. But taboo topics and socially deviant subjects are given a different kind of treatment in Asia, says the 23-year-old Le, a nerdy graphic designer by day and one of Vietnam’s homegrown comedians by night.
Perhaps, refreshingly, dick jokes don’t dominate here the way they do in North American or European comedy clubs. And you probably won’t hear a crude “yo mama” joke around these parts either, especially since respect and deference to your elders is paramount in Vietnamese society. In fact, riffing on political leaders, parents and sex can come off as “crude,” and those are just a few of the many red lines that some Asian comedians would never dare to cross. “Asians have long lived behind closed doors,” keeping private matters like family, political beliefs and intimacy out of the public arena, adds Le.
So, even if laughter knows no bounds, the type of jokes and their fine-tuned delivery do. Indeed, humor can get lost in translation between cultures and continents, particularly when moving eastward, says Peter McGraw, director of the University of Colorado Boulder’s Humor Research Lab. Clever puns, wordplay and inside jokes often lose their comedic oomph — for example, the Chinese would hardly LOL at American jokes about rednecks, and staid Germans would likely sneer at Asia’s love for lampshade-on-head routines.
