Jiaoying Summers is a stand-up comic who is packing theaters around the U.S., and last year premiered a one-hour comedy special on Hulu.
With three and a half million followers across TikTok, Instagram, and YouTube, she owes much of her success to short video clips of her standup routines which began going viral as the COVID pandemic was shutting down live entertainment. She had just opened The Hollywood Comedy club in Los Angeles, and found herself performing on her own stage to an empty theater. Social media is still a vital part of her work. Clips of ethnic shtick, off-color jokes, and raunchy crowd work are most popular, but audiences also seem drawn to monologues and interviews on topics such as the trauma of growing up in small-town China with an alcoholic father. ChinaFile’s Jeremy Goldkorn talks to her about growing up in Henan reading The Art of War with her grandfather, how her Hollywood dreams drove her to study finance in Kentucky, the ways family dynamics and cultural identity have shaped her comedy, and what she has in the works. Stay tuned for cameos from her children.