This study fills a gap in the research on stand-up comedy in China by shifting attention from mainstream Chinese-language scenes to the expatriate circuit, a key site of intercultural negotiation. Drawing on ethnographic fieldwork (2021–2025) at an expatriate comedy club in southern China and Norman Fairclough’s three-dimensional critical discourse analysis, we examine how English-language comedians negotiate historical privilege and marginality in a constrained “third space.” Analysis of the jokes reveals how performers deconstruct cultural binaries to create humor through lexical choices, evaluative adjectives, strategic code-switching, and intertextual play. To navigate state surveillance, they deploy a range of strategies: strategic ambiguity and plausible deniability, deflection and reframing, and topic avoidance. These tactics enable the performance of hybrid identities—authenticating observers who leverage their foreignness to validate state narratives, conscious transgressors who embed subtle critique without posing a direct challenge, and cultural mediators who broker cultural meaning through linguistic negotiation. Ultimately, this liminal persona sustains itself by balancing insider validation with outsider irreverence. Overall, this study extends Bhabha’s concept of the third space by theorizing it as a precarious arena of hybridity—where negotiation is possible yet structurally bounded and where humor arises not against constraint but through strategic engagement with it.
Feng et al. (Fri,) studied this question.