First Sip: BOTH Music (Really Hope This Concept Works) Kung Fu Komedy Club is kind of killing it. You can tell, because they have a lot of haters. They opened China's first comedy club below Kartel last November, and starting Tuesday, they're hosting the three-week China International Comedy Festival with celebrity judges like Dashan and Cui Yongyuan and over 60 performers from Shanghai and overseas. Ahead of the festival, we sat down with Kung Fu Komedy's founder Andy Curtain to talk about the complaints he's faced, Shanghai's growing comedy landscape, and that time he pushed a heckler off the stage and broke his guitar. Raul: I heard that you don’t book people who perform at other comedy clubs in town? Andy Curtain: I mean that’s not true. I’ll say this, we book the people we want to book. We’re not an open platform. We never offered to book everyone that crops up. We're trying to charge money and book people we want to develop. The reality is people think there’s a personal element, but actually we’re really objective on who we book.

People love to say they’re banned at our club, no one has been banned. There was one guy [who] fuckin didn’t pay for tickets, and we asked him to pay -- that’s a different situation. The guys here [aren’t] focused on Shanghai. Fuckin' PJ just did two months in Arizona, Turner’s moving to New York, Drew’s going to Edinburg, Storm’s going to Melbourne. These guys are trying to make their careers happen and that’s the whole story. Everyone at [our] club is trying to make a career out of comedy, and we’re not looking for anyone that’s not in that boat. X.Z. Palmer: What about the festival? Is that an open platform? Andy: Well there’s a limited number of spots. You don’t want to have 18 guys based in Shanghai. So we try to have a mix of people from outside of China and inside of China. We took the people with the best credits [that] we thought were the best comics. That doesn’t fill up the whole thing, you say okay this person brings something interesting to the table.

You want to have some women in there… So we were worried that people would think there’s some partiality to it. So what we did is we created local heats. And we said anyone can get into this and the two best performers will get a wild card entry into the preliminary round of the competition. There are a bunch of guys from Masse in the local heat. [Ed. Note: Masse here refers to the Shanghai Comedy Club, which is inside Masse bar] X: How much of the humor in your club is local inside jokes? Andy: It’s a real trap. When you start it’s easier to develop doing the really local stuff. Everyone learns this lesson when they go to do comedy somewhere else. They go, "oh fuck I had an hour yesterday and now I have 10 minutes." And for me personally, I’m not going to waste any time about the difference between Line 1 and Line 2 on the Shanghai metro. But you look at really great comics and they take local things and go so far into it. I’ve never had kids but I fucking understand how frustrated Louis CK gets.

Raul: What was your worst show?Ferrari Curtains Andy: I had a show in Kunshan, and someone threw up on me and the roof caught on fire. Eating Beets Weight LossAnd nobody in the bar reacted, and we ran out.Weight Loss Boot Camp Tennessee I had a guy in Hangzhou, this guy heckled. He looked like Duck Dynasty, and he came on [the stage] and he wanted to get the microphone. And the crowd was sick of him and when the crowd is sick of someone you can say the worst things imaginable. Like I’m going straight to hell for what I said -- implying that his priests had touched him and stuff. And he couldn’t get the microphone so he turned around and started addressing the audience. And I was like I’m just going to give him a little tap and bump him off.

And the worst thing you can do is to show real anger and the crowd will abandon you and you’ll never get them back. So I bumped him on a bad angle and he went face first into a table in the front row and landed on an acoustic guitar that he’d put there earlier. And everyone thought I thrown him off, so I was like "hey ha ha", hugging him... He picked up his guitar with the shattered strings and he was like you broke my guitar. X: Did you have to pay his for his guitar?I put it in the back of the stage and told him this is why you can’t have nice things. X: What was the worst that you’ve ever bombed? Andy: I had one really bad one where the girl was -- I just fucking misread the situation -- she was just being a bitch and she goes, "Move along." And I just reacted, and I go, "What happened in your childhood that made you like this?" And nobody got on board with that. And everyone [in] the whole room just goes RRRRrrr. And I was like ah fuck, "Put your hands together for the next person!"

X: Would you kick a performer off for their content? Andy: People really confuse the concept of freedom of speech in the West. They think they should say the terrible things in their head. I had guys get up and blast the n-word for five minutes. There is a line. Yes, we are a platform for you to perform, but you ruin the night for everyone. And he was humiliated, sitting in a room full of people who thought he was an idiot. I tell you what, people don’t realize how inappropriate their thoughts are until you give them a microphone and watch 20 people judge them for it. And then they’re like, "oh wait, I’m a massive racist, I never realized that." X: Have you been able to do humor at a Chinese audience’s expense? Andy: I think the differences between individual people are bigger than the difference between people’s cultures. People used to always say that Chinese people don’t like to be made fun of. I’ve said some terrible awful shit and got laughs for it.

I was doing this bit about this horrible [Chinese] neighbor, who’s just the worst person ever. Like, "She’s over 70 and I think about all the hardship she’s been through... and I’m just so glad that it happened to her." Raul: In music, you have things like Storm, which comes in with millions of dollars and everyone loves it and maybe the audience doesn't realize what's been going on at the grassroots level for years... Could you see the same thing happen with comedy, with Live Nation booking Russel Peters and such? Andy: Live Nation had been coming to my shows, they knew exactly what was going on. They cashed a check on the scene we built... But I don’t care, good luck to them. Here’s the thing, people get so fucking entitled. You think you deserve to do something in that competition? It’s like just embrace it. You’re so lucky to be here doing something. If someone wants a shot at it, let them do it. Kung Fu Komedy's inaugural China International Comedy Festival begins Tuesday, March 22.