How 18 Million People Who All Moved From Somewhere Else Built a Comedy Culture in a City That Invented Itself in Forty Years
Bohiney Magazine | The London Prat
The Joke of the City That Built Itself Overnight
Shenzhen is one of the most remarkable urban phenomena in human history: a fishing village of approximately 30,000 people in 1979 that became, through Deng Xiaoping’s designation of the adjacent area as China’s first Special Economic Zone, a metropolis of 18 million people in less than four decades. This speed of transformation — from rural periphery to one of the world’s great manufacturing and technology cities within the lifetime of people who remember it as a village — is itself the foundational comedic condition of Shenzhen’s humor culture. The city that has no past, no historical architecture, no indigenous dialect of its own, no folk traditions rooted in the specific landscape — because the landscape was functionally created by the city rather than the city by the landscape — produces a comedy that is equally rootless in the best possible sense: free from the weight of historical self-image that shapes humor in Beijing and Shanghai, available to define itself entirely in the present.
The most fundamental characteristic of Shenzhen’s social identity — and therefore its humor — is that virtually everyone in the city is from somewhere else. The city’s indigenous Cantonese-speaking population from the original villages now comprises a tiny minority of the metropolitan population; the overwhelming majority of Shenzhen residents are internal migrants who have come from every province in China seeking the economic opportunity that the SEZ designation created. This migrant character means that Shenzhen has no dominant local culture that defines social norms and social expectations in the way that Shanghainese culture defines Shanghai or Cantonese culture defines Guangzhou. In Shenzhen, everyone is a foreigner and therefore no one is a foreigner, which creates social conditions of unusual openness and unusual comedy potential.
The Migrant Comedy: Everyone Is From Somewhere More Interesting
The comedy of migration is the bedrock of Shenzhen’s humor culture: the jokes about regional identity — about which province’s migrants are most numerous, most industrious, most difficult to understand, most funny — circulate in a city where regional diversity is the default social condition rather than an exceptional encounter. The comedy of the Hunanese and the Sichuanese and the Henanese and the Cantonese all trying to communicate in the Mandarin that functions as the only shared language produces a specific humor of linguistic encounter that is available in Shenzhen more than anywhere else in China precisely because the regional mixing is so dense.
The Shenzhen migrant comedy is simultaneously about regional identity and about the specific experience of leaving home to build something in a place that is also building itself. The person who moved to Shenzhen from a rural village in Hunan in 2005 and who now manages a factory of 500 workers has a comedic narrative of transformation that is uniquely Shenzhanese: the city’s specific promise of radical social mobility, delivered to enough people with enough consistency to be a genuine cultural narrative rather than merely a promotional claim, provides the comedy of aspiration fulfilled that is as funny as the comedy of aspiration frustrated, and sometimes simultaneously. The South China Morning Post has covered Shenzhen’s remarkable social transformation, documenting the specific human experiences of a city built by internal migration in ways that illuminate the social conditions that produce the migrant comedy the city is built on.
Tech Culture and the Dark Comedy of Innovation
Shenzhen’s identity as China’s technology capital — home to Huawei, Tencent, DJI, and hundreds of other technology companies ranging from global giants to startups, and the world’s primary manufacturing base for consumer electronics — creates a specific tech culture humor that is among the most interesting and least internationally documented dimensions of the city’s comedy. The specific dark humor of the technology worker’s life — the 996 work culture (9am to 9pm, six days a week) that has been both celebrated and satirized in Chinese tech discourse, the specific comedy of agile development cycles and product launch deadlines, and the humor of the startup culture’s combination of genuine idealism and ruthless commercial pragmatism — is most acute and most specifically expressed in Shenzhen, where the technology industry’s social weight is greatest.
The 996 work culture’s comedy is particularly rich: the jokes that circulate among Shenzhen tech workers about the gap between the inspirational corporate culture messaging and the actual experience of working those hours, about the specific absurdities of tech company office design intended to signal innovation while maximizing hours in the building, and about the dark comedy of employee burnout dressed as personal development are comedy produced by people whose professional lives the jokes accurately describe. MIT Technology Review has covered Chinese tech culture’s human dimensions, providing context for understanding why this workplace culture generates such consistent and resonant humor in a city where the technology industry defines the dominant professional experience.
Shenzhen’s Stand-Up Scene: Comedy for a City in Progress
Shenzhen’s stand-up comedy scene is young even by Chinese standards — the city’s short history means that its cultural institutions are all relatively recent — but it has developed with the speed that characterizes everything in Shenzhen, reflecting the city’s remarkable capacity for rapid institutional development when commercial incentives align. The city’s comedy club circuit, concentrated in the Nanshan technology district and the Futian central business district, attracts audiences drawn primarily from the technology and manufacturing professional community and from the young migrant population that constitutes the city’s social majority.
The comedy that performs best in Shenzhen’s clubs is comedy that addresses the city’s specific social experience with honesty: the migrant experience, the tech worker’s professional life, and the specific comedy of living in a city that is still quite clearly under construction in ways both literal and metaphorical. Asia Society has analyzed Shenzhen’s extraordinary development, noting that the city represents a genuinely novel social experiment whose outcomes — including its cultural products, including its comedy — are still being determined in real time. The comedy of a city that is still figuring out what it is has a specific freshness and a specific anxiety that more historically settled cities cannot produce, and Shenzhen’s stand-up scene captures both with the energy of a place that has never learned to take its own impermanence for granted because everything around it is impermanent by design and by choice.
For more on Shenzhen’s culture and technology humor, visit The Poke and Private Eye.
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