Talk shows are not crosstalk, and Li Shi is not Guo Degang.
Wen 丨Heike Finance Sun Yi'an
Talking about domestic talk shows is about the same as talking about xiaoguo culture, and talking about xiaoguo culture can't avoid its big IP Li Birthday.
On January 13, The domestic comedy production agency Laughing Fruit Culture, which uses talk shows to make a splash, posted a program promotion plan for the non-talk show business through the official Smile Fruit Factory, that is, it plans to hold a so-called talk show conference with Tencent Video, and on the same day, it opened a high-profile recruitment for actors, screenwriters, directors and other multi-working groups.
Opening up the business map to the outside is actually a necessary exploration under the current intertwining of various factors, and the base camp of Xiaoguo culture will most likely occupy the talk show for a long time.
Talk shows not only need new people, but also need some new ways to play.
In the past six months, Li Shi, as the co-founder of Xiaoguo Culture, has broken the Buddhist personality he has established for a long time with a work that is different from the past.
The book, titled "Li Birthday Talk Show Work Manual", was published in August 2021, and the author column impressively wrote Li Shi's name. In this age when there is no threshold for publishing a book, this is really nothing, especially for celebrities, if you want to. Moreover, this small book of 224 pages has been bombarded by many netizens for "perfunctory", "chicken soup", "idle nonsense" and even "waste paper". But it is indeed one of the few paper publications compiled by talk show practitioners based on front-line experience in China, in which Li Shiban lists more than a dozen quite practical working methods at a glance, as of the publication of this article, 8151 Douban netizens have given the book a not very low score of 7.2.
Whether it is the work habit of "getting up and writing 5 paragraphs and changing 5 paragraphs before going to bed", or the emphasis on the importance of writing word by word, or the three consecutive calls to colleagues "Don't leave the battlefield, don't leave your comrades-in-arms, don't leave the enemy", the rigor and self-motivation conveyed by the "Work Manual" mixed with the blood of the struggle chicken are very different from the light and free image that Li Shi has always used to show the public.
The 32-year-old Li Shi has been on fire for nearly 5 years relying on the huge potential energy of the Internet, to be precise, this fire has been ignited since March 2017. At that time, the variety show "Spit Conference" jointly produced by Tencent Video and Xiaoguo Culture, Li Tian, who had a small eye and an open mouth, was a high-quality hilarious duan, and quickly became popular all over the country.
In the past 5 years, the laughing fruit culture with Li Tian as the banner has been favored by capital, and has completed 8 rounds of financing, the company's valuation has exceeded 3 billion yuan, deeply participated in the production of a number of popular comedy variety shows in China, and collected several unique and talented stand-up comedians under its command, forming a strong position in the industry.
The tide of the times is rushing rapidly, the competition in various industries has intensified, the inner volume has become a hot word, and the funeral culture marked by Li Shi's shouting of "Happy friends, the world is not worth it" has accurately poked the hearts of countless urban young people. But the equally young artist is not only a producer of creative content in the form of idle clouds and wild cranes, but also a representative of the near-exclusive supply side of stand-up comedy products, and the demand to amplify prestige and the increase of some responsibility have also made him think about the future of the industry.
Whatever the purpose, Li Shi, who has been labeled seriously, may really want to establish something, but the difficulties are foreseeable.
The ambition of capital and the gradual change of public opinion atmosphere are alienating this industry, Li Shi himself still has many obvious contradictions that cannot be self-consistent, and the controversy caused by the so-called lying win workplace advertisement that endorses a certain women's brand underwear and being punished by the regulatory authorities is only one of the manifestations, even if these are not mentioned, the institutions he partners with and the prosperity of the domestic talk show market are by no means what he alone can influence.
01
Border dilemmas
In October 2021, the fourth season of "Talk Show Conference" ended with the much-anticipated Zhou Qimo winning the championship, and ended in cheers. Seeing that the number of online programs is rising steadily, the newcomers who have entered the game have emerged and frequently mentioned hot searches, the ticket prices of offline performances have soared and the number of shows is full, Luo Yonghao can't help but sigh to Li Birthday in the program: Your circle feels like it is going to explode.
It is an indisputable fact that talk shows have become popular in the entertainment industry.
Compared with the native Chinese traditional language arts of sketches and cross-talk, which have only been well known to the domestic public in recent years, it is an out-and-out imported product. As a transliteration of the English "talk show", the original meaning is the talk column broadcast on TV, and in China, it has become a mixture of talk shows and stand-up comedies; and popular variety shows such as "Talk Show Conference" and "Spit Conference", which are currently close to the latter, are closer in form to the latter, that is, stand-up comedy.
Stand-up comedy originated in the West, and its English expression is "stand-up comedy", that is, the performance mode in which individual actors tell various strips through microphones on stage and interact live with the audience. The content of stand-up comedy is rooted in life, and the performers publish a series of interpretations of social issues through keen insight into reality, and then impress the audience with sharp humor and sharpness, and their powerful influence can penetrate all levels of Europe and the United States.
Talk shows with decades of deep accumulation abroad were introduced to China in the 1970s and 1980s, and first landed in Hong Kong: comedian Wong Tzu Wah translated "stand-up comedy" with "Dong Du Laugh" and performed more than 2 hours in the Hong Kong Island dialect for the first time, making stand-up comedy famous in Xiangjiang. Also a localized interpretation of talk shows, Zhou Libo's "Haipai Qingkou" created by combining "Dong Du Laugh", Shanghai burlesque drama and Beijing stand-up comedy was also popular in Shanghai around 2010.
However, talk shows or stand-up comedies really break through the regional attributes, or ride the east wind of Internet popularity. With the advent of the era of national microblogging, immediacy discussions around public events have become possible, and language comedy programs such as "Saturday Night Live", "Comedy Center Spit Conference", "Tonight's Post-80s Talk Show", "Venus Show" and other hot spots have sprung up, which is not only an echo of people's needs, but also a powerful preparation for talk shows to gradually move closer to mass culture.
2017 is an important year. If the previous popularity of talk shows in China can only be summarized by four words of "tepid", then the emergence of "Spit Conference" directly threw talk shows to all corners of the online world. In order to adapt to the cultural context of Chinese politeness and moderation, Western talk shows, which are known for their offensive spirit, have to properly restrain their sharp edges after landing on the ground, and avoid cultural shock in a gentle way.
For the first time, "Spitting Conference" aimed the fierce gunfire at specific public figures, and the positioning of pulling the star off the altar instantly captured people's attention.
Also eye-catching is Li Tian, who is at the forefront of the spit.
As we all know, as the planner, the first screenwriter and performer of the first season of "Spitting Conference", Li Tianji, who runs through the stage and on stage, combines his creative skills and acting talent, and is a veritable soul member of the program team. No one thought that a person who advertised "all-you-can- and often thought of himself as "no point of view" would become a locomotive that drove talk shows forward.
But Li Shi seized the most suitable opportunity. His all-indifference joke gesture of mistakenly hit and bumped, just became a breakthrough in social pressure, and once caused people to pursue and even imitate.
Erasing meaning with jokes and replacing criticism with deconstruction is the way Li Shi's talk show opens. Unlike the aggressiveness of up-and-coming Yang Kasa and others, the dissolution language and the unsparing attitude to life are evident in Li's performances, which allow him to cleverly avoid various tit-for-tat confrontations.
Domestic talk shows have been exploring the possible space under the development of norms, and the offenses to the guests of the "Spit Conference" are also compromise offenses with agreements and scripts, and Li Shi has drawn boundaries for himself from the beginning. This is evident from the money-making method he taught Xu Zhiyuan in the ninth episode of the first season of "Thirteen Invitations" broadcast in January 2018: Don't tell too much truth, don't challenge too many people to dare to say. Sticking to this within the scope of ability and doing a good job in the laughing business seems to be not difficult for Li Shi.
It's really important to put good boundaries in place. In September 2020, the Ministry of Culture and Tourism of the People's Republic of China issued the Notice on Deepening the Reform of "Decentralization and Management Service" to Promote the Prosperity and Development of the Performance Market. The circular mentions that for small theater performance activities, it is necessary to focus on strengthening the content review and on-site supervision of language programs such as talk shows, cross-talk, and avant-garde dramas.
No rules and no circles, supervision is always indispensable, but whether the expression of jokes and wandering can make the talk show always maintain its sharpness and novelty, and to what extent Li Shi's very personal performance style can be borrowed and copied, the answer is unknown.
02
The atmosphere is impetuous
For Li, talk shows were not where his original interests were, let alone ideals and feelings. Before entering this field, Li Shi, who was still studying at a university in Guangzhou, wrote a paragraph in The Rice Under the screen name of "Self-Tearing Self-Egg", and thus became acquainted with Wang Jianguo and screenwriter Shi Hang, who were also duanzi players. After graduating from school, Li First wrote freelance for the head advertising agency Ogilvy, and later joined Shanghai Oriental Satellite TV's "Tonight's Post-80s Talk Show" with Wang Jianguo, becoming the main writer behind the scenes for the latter.
Li Shi's first performance on stage was in "Tonight's Post-80s Talk Show". In the memories mentioned by Li Shi himself, he was tempted by double salary after writing the script for the show for several years, and was kicked on the stage by the producer who was optimistic about him, so that when he thought back on this past, he said that he could not remember the details, but clearly remembered that he gave 800 yuan.
Such an expression is in line with Li's consistent laxity. For a long time, Li Was more willing to verbally attribute his success to luck rather than to hard work. You could say it's a smarter kind of self-packaging, but there's another possibility – that's the truth.
Li Shi has been quite smooth along the way. He stressed that he did not deliberately establish a human setting, but he was also a typical performer who broke the circle with a distinct personal image and won the popularity of the audience since the talk show was introduced to China. In the professional category, Li Tian's acting skills are not recognized by everyone, but even peers have to admit that the reason why countless audiences are deeply in love with talk shows is because they initially got the charm and laughter of this art discipline from Li Shi.
Li Shi, who has begun to gain public popularity, is still quite far from the maturity of art and career, but he has just opened a door to the development of talk shows in China, and this value should not be underestimated.
Internet traffic has accelerated the iteration of new things unprecedentedly faster, and "what kind of person" is easier to leave traces and take root in people's hearts than "what kind of things", which also explains why many artists have given up tempering business and turned to operating people.
Li Is different.
Li Shi, who joined "Strange Story" as a mentor, once seemed out of place among a group of debaters who like to collide with each other with their views, but he can always output some unexpected speeches. In the debate between saving famous paintings or saving cats, he not only defeated Huang Zhizhong, the representative of the intellectual elite, but also defeated the seriousness and loftiness contained in the "distant cry" with a few words; in the slow variety show "Longing for Life", Li Shi was the least active guest of labor, and shouted that he just did not like to work, but the audience just liked his lazy "Ge You's paralyzed" appearance.
People who want to step into the threshold of talk shows find examples and confidence in Li Tian, as if as long as there is eloquence and stories, anyone can go on stage and say a 5-minute talk show, and once the rhythm is correct, the fate of the next Li Birthday and the big red may fall on them.
On the surface, this is the case. After one or more performances out of the circle, passers-by who had not found this person a moment ago suddenly glowed, and Hu Lan, Wang Mian, Li Xueqin, Pang Bo and others all quickly became famous on the stage of the talk show, and then doubled their value.
In recent years, a large number of talk show actors have been excavated and seen, and although Li Shi has played the role of a leader in this to some extent, it is undoubtedly the Laughing Fruit Culture in which Li Shi holds 4.58% of the shares under the real name Li Ruichao. Since its inception in 2014, this content production company has always taken comedy talk shows as the direction of the team's deep cultivation, and its idea of creating a closed loop of online and offline consumption of Chinese talk shows and a unique one needs more source of living water as a support.
Different from the loose and free growth of Western narrow talk show actors based on interest, the batch incubation of domestic laughing fruit culture and other institutions is ultimately rushing to return. After the newcomers who were popular with the show with laughter fruit mastered a certain amount of traffic, the first time was not to feed the industry, but to pour energy into various business activities: Hulan became popular and connected to 3 variety shows, Pang Bo became the host of the program, and Yang Kasa was busy taking advertisements and shooting photos - but recently she was willing to become the protagonist of the Internet violence again because of her endorsement.
No one dares to make talk shows the only bet, and everyone has a multi-habitat future. As Yang Kasa joked when he performed on stage in the fourth season of the talk show: Must the talk show king be the first place? It can also be the reddest one.
The impetuous atmosphere is bound to affect the actor's concept, and Li Shi himself is no exception.
According to incomplete statistics, since 2017, Li has participated in the recording of 34 programs, published 4 books, and participated in a TV series and a movie. In the ever-changing entertainment jungle, the choice between fame and art is originally an eternal problem, but only by making a clear analysis and answer can Li Shi truly become the benchmark of the talk show industry. And at this point, he obviously has a long way to go.
03
Sustainability is a mystery
Since the "Spit Conference" detonated the domestic talk show market, many people have often compared the laughing fruit culture to the Deyun Society, and Li Zhiheng to Guo Degang.
Putting cross-talk and talk shows together, such a comparison cannot be said to be completely unreasonable, it at least reflects one point: in the perception of some audiences, cross talk and talk shows have similarities in form of expression and final effect. But the really knowledgeable people will not be mistaken, they are not only different in different genes and species, but also have significant differences in operating mechanisms, actor mentors, experience accumulation, etc., the two can neither become each other, nor is there real competition.
Li Shi is also actively discovering the problems in the industry, such as his many expressions of disgust and opposition to the actor's abuse of harmonic terriers and internal terriers, which touched the tip of the iceberg of the bottleneck of the domestic development of talk shows. Talk shows should have evolved more and more in the cyclical realities of creation and performance, but the reality is that actors who are busy walking around and showing their faces have no time to devote themselves to open mai performances. In this way, it is difficult for them to accumulate and polish new strips that are grounded, and they cannot maintain a sense of stage that is free to retract for a long time.
The valuable thing about talk shows is that while entertaining the public, they can bring criticism and reflection on the external environment and the fate of individuals, and further form the meaning construction of "breaking and then standing". House prices, North Drift, 996, wine table culture, mid-life crisis, etc. around many topics closely related to the lives of ordinary people, unique speeches require independent personality and even clear bones, and supplemented by the accumulation of life experience and long-term tempering of expression, talk show art can be both shape and spirit.
But China's talk shows have advanced too fast, especially in recent years, driven by commercial interests, the laughing fruit culture with Li Shi as the so-called chief content officer has condensed the development process of foreign talk shows for decades, and the long professional accumulation and technical inheritance have been passed by, and ordinary people who have never appeared in the public eye can become popular with a few minutes of video performances, and "ten years of offstage work" seems to have become dispensable. Unlike the 30 or 40 years of professional experience of senior foreign talk show workers, the average entry time of China's oldest batch of talk show actors is only six or seven years.
Li Shi and other post-80s and post-90s stand-up comedians are welcomed, and what they have in common is the truth and sincerity naturally revealed in the performance: behind the catharsis of Yang Kasa's "Puxin Man" is the pain of women's long-term repression and gaze; Zhou Qimo's conquest of the whole field with "decoration stems" stems from his years of hard work and rushing north drift; Li Xueqin's "mournful and cool" comes from her questioning of the elite education and training model and her desire to redefine the rules of the social game... If these inspirations are not replenished in time, once the accumulated experience is used up, the actors will inevitably fall into self-repetition and become less funny.
Content creation is the basic disk of talk shows, but subjective and objective factors are leading to the expansion of this basic disk stagnation or even shrinkage, even Wang Mian, the champion of the third season of "Talk Show Conference", has the extreme phenomenon of using internal terriers in the whole performance.
Xiaoguo Culture also wants to broaden the path offline and promote the benign growth of talk shows, but the popular actors simply do not have time to go to the Laughing Fruit Factory and goat GOAT to perform for the audience, including Li Tian, who has not opened a personal talk show for a long time.
Domestic talk shows are originally typical urban art, the strip is based on the city, and the occasional rural area is only a foil. Its laugh points serve a specific audience, unlike skits and cross-talk, which have a rich mass base in the sinking city. In the circle of post-95s and post-00s, talk shows may be a new type of social currency; but if the amount of reality it carries is constantly narrowing, the future of talk shows will not be on a broader stage, but a self-atrophy that draws a prison.
Whether it is the publisher who makes money in order to rub the heat, or whether Li Shiguo really intends to make some contributions to the industry, the creative experience of providing experience for the newcomers to the talk show is always written into a book, although it is sparse and it is accused of injecting a lot of water.
Li also began to emphasize organizational discipline. It is said that Li Shi once expressed his appreciation for Hulan, not because of Hulan's talk show talent, but because Hulan was drunk at night but did not affect the next day's work.
Condensing the company's creators' responsibilities has shifted Li's image from the industry's "head wolf" to a "shepherd dog". Earlier, the free and loose Li Shi revealed that he and his partner Wang Jianguo had rejected the establishment of Oriental Satellite TV, it is said that it was because he did not like to be restricted, and he had to go away.