Des Bishop: Made in China

You’ll find the idea of comedian-as-outsider all over the city this month, but there’s life in the old trope yet. Just look at Des Bishop, who’s taken it to the next level in a supremely watchable travelogue of an Irish-American in China. He hasn’t just visited the world’s most populous country – he’s lived and breathed it, even mastering the language.

This is essentially a by-product of a documentary in which he set out to establish himself on the country’s fledgling standup circuit. During that year he found a menial service job, failed to crack the materially-motivated dating scene and wangled his way on to China’s equivalent of Take Me Out.

First, though, he needed to learn Mandarin. That meant negotiating the minefield of tonal pronunciation: get the inflection wrong, and his adopted name takes on an obscene new meaning. He wrings the topic dry with amusing exasperation and there’s endless novelty in hearing his Queens-via-Dublin accent slip into fluent Chinese.

Bishop’s determination to break into this impenetrable culture is what drives the show along. Rather than the sort of mawkish treatment that tosses around words like “vibrant” and “humbling”, he handles cultural difference with a pleasing roughness. Whenever he comes up against Chinese reserve, he needles and joshes until he finds some common ground.

It’s affectionate, yet Bishop’s never shy to get stuck in to China’s hang-ups, whether that’s the government censors’ paranoia over the three Ts (Taiwan, Tiananmen, Tibet), the concept of maintaining “face” or the weight of expectation for the young to grow up fast, work hard and settle down.

He's spent long enough immersed in the culture to make such judgments – and in any case, insensitivity cuts both ways. He encountered outrageous racism while working as a lowly restaurant greeter, or being inspected like livestock on a gameshow. But to him, that’s simply something to fuel his mission to charm a nation of 1.3billion, which culminates hilariously in him belting out an Irish rebel anthem on Chinese national TV.

The hour’s packed to the gunwales with little insights into a fascinating place, and it absolutely flies by. When Bishop ends on a jubilant note, finally getting some locals to share his ebullience, you sense he’s got a hundred stories left to tell.

That’s also true of Stuart Black’s The Crossroads, a scattering of squalid true-life stories interspersed with hypnotic, florid passages in the style of 1821's Confessions of an English Opium-Eater.

Here the outsider isn’t a Westerner adrift in the East, but an ambassador from the fringes of society—cadaverous, black-clad and with lank, grey locks—who’s here to tell us what he’s seen. Black’s led a life dictated by impulse, and his set flip-flops between moments of middle-class stability and drug-addled, underclass woe. 

After a deceptively mundane intro on day jobs and commuting etiquette, without warning we get a first look at one of his escapist “crackpot alchemist” reveries. In these interludes, the story just told—his abortive visit to a brothel, for example—is rehashed in the words of a laudanum-loaded, 19th-century scientist looking forwards in time, recasting Black’s experiences in frilly polysyllables that obscure the depravity they describe.

Black tells us how, having flunked his exams, he spent five years on the dole in a Brighton attic. There’s a stomach-churning lesson on what happens when you don’t wash for six months, and a fantastically vivid image of him hunkered Gollum-like in the dark as disco leaks through the trapdoor from his housemates’ party. Cut to another life of his. He’s a homeowner, working at Microsoft – but he’s also a functioning alcoholic who one day gets an itch, sells everything and washes up in Cape Town, seduced by its cheap and dangerous living.

When a comic describes a friend with this line—“French Dave lost an eye smashing up a toilet”—you know you’re not dealing with someone who lives like most of us. This is a man who’s found himself sleeping in an abandoned mental hospital, then a van, who’s suffered a psychological collapse on mushrooms – and who may well do it all again.

It’s not meant to sound exciting, it’s simply a demonstration of the precariousness of our comfortable lives, encouraging an awareness of privilege and empathy for the homeless. Sounds cheery, doesn’t it? Actually, thanks to Prozac, Black's a happy guy. He’s gentle and affable, with a West Country twang and light delivery that tempers any tone of “I’ve been there, done that, my world’s bigger than yours”.

More than once, he compares the ambition of his verbal acrobatics to watching someone attempt a triple somersault and come crunching down on his neck. It’s gratifying to watch him try it anyway, only to land on his feet.