But Zhou isn’t alone in being a popular regional act. Xiao Shenyang and Guo Degang are also well-known funny men in China who have injected personality in their humour. Though neither is doing stand-up comedy like Zhou, Xiao has risen to fame with his silly personality in northeastern Chinese comic skits, while even Guo – a famous xiangsheng actor from Tianjin – has established a following for the earthy and realistic feel he’s brought to dialogues.

“Guo Degang has found a way to make xiangsheng a bit more edgy and biting,” says Moser, who is also an occasional crosstalk performer. “The way he delivers something ordinary, with a look on his face that makes it seem like he’s thinking another way, he’s making it a bit real again.”

And on the other side of the world, another PRC-born comedian is also having his moment to shine this year. Not a typical American stand-up comic by any means, Joe Wong (Huang Xi), originally from Jilin province, has attracted attention after his hilarious and earnestly-delivered stand-up performance on The Late Show with David Letterman.

“You want comedy to be something where everyone is laughing and engaged.”

He is a rarity. A biochemist whose native language is not English, Wong took on a cultural art form vastly different from what he grew up with in China.

“As a Chinese guy in America, I always feel like my English is not the best, so I’m fighting an uphill battle in terms of competition as a stand-up comedian,” Wong tells us over the phone from his home in Boston. “But this is something I really enjoy, so I just kept doing it.”

Though he grew up listening to, and loving, xiangsheng radio broadcasts during its heydays in China, Wong says American-style comedy is his ideal form of humour.

He is a comic who commands an audience sincerely with self-deprecating jokes, who will walk on stage and greet people with a simple, “Hi everybody … So, uh, I’m Irish.” Wong sparsely sprinkles in material poking fun at his Chinese heritage, but mostly draws roars of laughter from his knack for playing with the illogical and nonsensical.

“You want comedy to be something where everyone is laughing and engaged,” says Wong, who also performed on Ellen DeGeneres’ Ellen’s Bigger, Longer & Wider Show in June. “You should get an immediate sense of the individual; a journey through the performer’s mind, and how he sees the world and understands things.”

And though they’re like night and day, that’s not too different from how Zhou Libo has become so side-splittingly successful.

After all, his basis for making people laugh, Zhou says, is this: “What you know but didn’t imagine; imagined but didn’t say; said but didn’t dare to do.”