Zhou Qimo: I don't get arrogant enough to think of myself as a talk show ceiling

Reporter/Qiu Guangyu　

The fourth season of "Talk Show Conference" is over, and this year's "Big King" belongs to zhou Qimo, who is tall, wears glasses, speaks slowly and slowly, and has a vivid expression.

In the third season of the 2020 "Talk Show Conference", Zhou Qimo was known as the "elder" and "ceiling" of the talk show industry, but he only reached the semifinals. By 2021, with the "Listen to Baibai" sentence of Tianjin flavor English out of the circle, people will laugh heartily, but also gradually discover zhou Qimo's accurate imitation, conveyance of the performance behind the hidden deep concern for those urban small people like him. Someone always says in the barrage: Isn't this playing me?

Near the end of the third season of "Talk Show Conference", China News Weekly interviewed Zhou Qimo, and the following is his self-description.

A show earns 16 bucks

I first came into contact with talk shows in 2008, around 2009, when I was still in college, and I often uploaded clips of foreign (talk show) actors on the intranet, and I was more impressed by George Carlin. Later, after I worked as an English trainer in Beijing, I once saw a special scene by actor Jerry Seinfeld on the Internet, and I was particularly impressed by his stage form, and I thought his passages were both subtle and funny.

In 2015, I started looking for an offline talk show venue in Beijing, and I joined the Beijing Talk Show Club at that time just thinking about talk shows as a hobby. The first time I officially said that the talk show was at a bar in Sanlitun called "On the Way", and now this bar may no longer be there. I was very nervous on stage, my hands and feet were cold for a few minutes, and I didn't have the heart to watch other actors perform when waiting for the stage, and I kept memorizing my own words. It was a new performance, and after the performance, the audience reacted well, not too cold, and then said so.

But at that time, I didn't want to make talk shows a career, it was a hobby. There were two reasons that prompted me to do full-time talk shows: first, I didn't want to be a teacher anymore, this profession was too tiring, and it wasn't what I wanted to do the most; second, there was my first full-time talk show actor in Beijing, Boss Shi, who was still in the financial industry, very popular, and quit his job. His actions made me want to do it too. At that time, I didn't have too many worries, and I felt that the training industry could go back at any time, and it was a big deal that I could still go back to being a teacher before I starved to death.

At that time, I was a full-time actor, but I knew in my heart that I was not yet a professional actor. Professional actors mean that you can use this craft to support yourself, which is the bottom line, but in the environment at that time, even if you were doing talk shows full-time, there were not many regular performances. I was under the impression that at that time, there were almost only two full-time actors in Beijing, me and Boss Shi.

At that time, Boss Shi and I would take the initiative to contact the show and be our own agent. Once we rented a venue near 798 for a "double spelling" performance, and I said, let's go to the "ground promotion". We got someone to make a poster, big winter, and handed out flyers in the park. I hadn't done the market at all, and I was whimistic, thinking that there should be a lot of people coming. The scene was also full that day, but no one came through my promotion, all the people in the "Audience WeChat Group" who had seen our performance before and their friends.

For quite some time, my income level did not return to when I was a teacher, which is not to say how high the income as a teacher is, but to say that the risk of full-time talk show is very high. Before Boss Shi set up a "stand-alone comedy" and officially signed actors, there was no institution in Beijing that could organize such routine professional performances for actors. Therefore, at that time, the actors who liked to talk about talk shows could only save their own performances, and someone would say: Do you want to talk about open wheat recently? Seeing that everyone wants to talk about it, then contact the bar that has held a performance before and "save" an open wheat.

Zhou Qimo. Photo/Courtesy of respondents

At that time, domestic talk show clubs were all formed out of personal hobbies, and there were several performance plans a week, sometimes even once a month, not all commercial performances, most of which were free, and this kind of performance would bring a little traffic to the bar. There are also performance platforms, such as the "humor community", but they do not sign actors and organize two or three performances a month. Moreover, an actor's paragraph can no longer be used in the short term, in order to ensure that each performance is different, only everyone can take turns to perform, can not be continuous.

I only get 200 yuan for a performance organized by the "Humor Community", but I have also performed a cheaper performance, that is, the kind of "saving" performance mentioned above, the ticket income is cut off the venue fee, and a few actors have only 16 yuan in my hand. At that time, there were very few performances, and there was no talk show screenwriting or anything like that. In 2017, I participated in an online competition held by iQIYI and received a prize money. In those years, in addition to savings, I lived on offline performances and competition bonuses.

I also took over activities similar to the annual meeting, but I felt that this was exchanging my mental health for money, and I had to slow down after a performance. Because some art forms do not require audience participation, singers sing well is simply good, but it is embarrassing to tell a paragraph that the audience does not participate and does not laugh. In 2015, I met Mr. Huang Xi in "North Korea", and his talk show at the White House in the United States was very popular. When I had more experience in acting, I found that that kind of occasion was really too difficult to perform, it was originally a dinner party, and everyone didn't know him very well, and it was very remarkable to be able to control such an occasion.

No one has ever described me as "OG" before

In the past two years, the talk show industry has developed, for me there are two big changes, the first is that with the corporatization operation, let the talk show performance formalized, we don't have to worry about the next week there will be no performance, psychologically it will be easier, the mind will be more used in creation. Second, it is that variety shows such as "Talk Show Conference" and "Spit Conference" have really developed talk shows in China, making it truly become a cultural consumption model in everyone's amateur life.

Going to a show like Talk Show Conference can put pressure on me. I wouldn't be arrogant enough to think of myself as a "talk show ceiling". Before coming to this show, no one used the word "OG" to describe me. Doing comedy, holding the actors higher, for the audience is to raise expectations, the actors will be more difficult. But this matter is no longer within my control, and can only be developed naturally. If some viewers say I can't write a paragraph, I don't care. I think talk shows need different types of actors, and they can be enriched on the basis of the present, and everyone can choose the actors they like to watch, which is the same in any technical category, writers and singers.

And in "Talk Show Conference", I had a big personal gain. I began to try to enjoy the stage and learn to relax. Because sometimes I am a more serious person, I really feel that "Talk Show Conference" is a very serious talk show competition program at the beginning, so when I first recorded the show, I was still a little nervous, especially when the performance did not receive the expected recognition, and then there would be a little psychological obstacle when I went down, and when I acted, I would think: What is everyone's reaction? Are there any laughers patting the lights? Why hasn't the lights been tapped yet? In the final game, my purpose is to correct this state. So, although the result of the last game was not so good, I was very happy, because this was the process of my psychological struggle with myself, this time I did not lose my mind, I used the spirit of "dead pigs are not afraid of boiling water" and "broken jars and broken" to hypnotize myself.

At the time, online recording was unfamiliar to me. Online recording programs need big topics, big themes, actors need to have strong content output, express some social issues or things that netizens care about, and everyone loves to listen. But offline performances, we tend to talk about some more personal, life-oriented things, if these things are directly moved to online, the audience may feel too small, trivial. To sum up, the difference is that offline performances will have a state of communication, and the sense of communication of recorded programs is relatively weak.

I have tried the news theme offline, and the audience's reaction is not very good, it may be because the times are changing, and the things that the audience appreciates have also changed. An actor, from an unknown background, the audience wants to come to the offline occasion to have fun, if you come up not to ridicule yourself, to talk about some things about yourself, but to talk about what is wrong with our society, they may feel that "you are educating me". Fortunately, now the offline audience, if there is a person who has watched this show and knows me, he does not need to spend another 10 minutes to let me build trust with him. Because he first has to know if you can be funny, in order to be willing to listen to you talk about these things with a little self-expression, which is also a huge gain for me.