Dongbeihua: Northeastern Mandarin in Chinese Stand-up ^{CEFR B1}

Over the past two decades, social media and video platforms such as Bilibili have helped stand-up comedy reach a large national audience. Since Xi Jinping took office in 2013, censorship tightened and political satire largely disappeared from television and online, so comedians turned to dialect humour and cultural material.

Dongbeihua, a subgroup of Mandarin spoken in Liaoning, Jilin, Heilongjiang and parts of Inner Mongolia, has become the dominant tongue of Chinese stand-up. About 100 million people in China speak it. Its phonetic closeness to Beijingese and standard Mandarin makes many expressions sound slightly odd, which performers use for wordplay. Common Dongbeihua terms include māo used as a verb, the verb zhěng with many meanings, zéilā meaning “very”, and hūyou meaning “cheat” or “fool”.

Stereotypes of Dongbei people — straightforward, enthusiastic but quarrelsome — aided the dialect’s national spread. In the 1990s Zhao Benshan reached national attention at the Spring Festival Gala with rural, simple-minded characters. Later economic hardship in the region made some viewers sensitive to these portrayals.