Finding Humor and History Across Cultures: A Chinese Scholar Takes On Kurdish Stand-Up

PARIS — When Youshan Huang took the stage the audience was expecting the usual local talent. What they got instead was a Chinese doctoral candidate delivering sharp, observational comedy in fluent Kurmanji Kurdish.

Ms. Huang, a PhD candidate in sociology at the École des Hautes Études en Sciences Sociales (EHESS) in Paris, represents an unlikely intersection of international academia and grassroots performance art. By day, she conducts research on the social and political roles of women in northeastern Syria, commonly known as Rojava. By night, she turns the cultural missteps, linguistic quirks, and absurdities of her cross-continental journey into stand-up comedy routines.

Appearing recently on Dora Pirsê ya te ye, a weekly interview program broadcast by the Kurdish digital news organization Botan Times, Ms. Huang reflected on how an academic interest in Middle Eastern languages transformed into a comedic career.

“My story is quite long,” Ms. Huang said during the interview. “I grew up in a relatively small city in China—small by Chinese standards, meaning about four million people. I eventually studied Arabic literature in university, pursued a master’s degree in the Netherlands, and eventually found myself captivated by the Kurdish language and culture.”

Her path to the stage was paved by geopolitics and academia. Driven by an interest in feminist movements and the international effort against ISIS in northern Syria, Ms. Huang undertook doctoral research under the supervision of the prominent sociologist Hamit Bozarslan. To deepen her field studies, she immersed herself in Kurdish, mastering standard Kurmanji through formal studies at the Kurdish Institute of Paris and extended fieldwork in Syrian towns such as Qamishlo, Hasakah, and Kobani.

It was during her time in Syria—and later back among the diaspora in France—that she realized her unique position offered rich material for humor.

“When I first lived in Qamishlo, I was the only Chinese person around,” Ms. Huang recalled. “Every day people would invite me into their homes, or shout out in the streets. Navigating that curiosity, along with the nuances of regional dialects, gave me a perspective that didn't belong in an academic thesis, but fit perfectly on stage.”

Ms. Huang’s comedic repertoire relies heavily on the incongruity of her identity and the linguistic traps of a non-native speaker. In her routines, she jokes about speaking a more formal, literary Kurdish than many native speakers in the European diaspora, leading locals to playfully accuse her of sounding like a political cadre or a foreign intelligence operative.

Her transition to stand-up began in Arabic, performing at clubs in Damascus and later among the Arabic-speaking community in Paris. But when a local Kurdish comedy night opened in the French capital, she saw an opportunity to bridge another gap.

“I realized that so many Kurds raised abroad struggle with their native language,” Ms. Huang noted. “I thought to myself: If they can get up there and joke about their identity, why can’t I?”

Her performances have quickly gained traction within the Kurdish diaspora in Western Europe. Observers note that her humor works because it avoids stereotype, focusing instead on shared human experiences, the warmth of Middle Eastern hospitality, and the sheer complexity of learning a language with intricate grammar structures like grammatical gender and ergativity—concepts entirely foreign to native Mandarin speakers.

While comedy remains a passion, Ms. Huang’s primary focus remains her doctoral thesis on the societal transformations led by women in Rojava. Beyond her academic dissertation, she hopes to publish articles and produce podcasts in Mandarin to introduce Kurdish culture and history to audiences back home in China, where interest in the Middle East has grown alongside expanding economic ties.

“Some jokes simply cannot be translated across cultures,” Ms. Huang said. “Politics, local slang, regional history—they belong to a specific context. But the impulse to laugh at ourselves when we try to understand one another? That is universal.”