Stand-up, by contrast, requires no rules, no script, no partner—instead, it rewards individualism. “You can talk about your real feelings and have people be OK with it,” Wong says. “In America, there’s a lot of deadpan humor, but in China there’s less because people are more reserved in their regular life.” Even he can’t work out the differences between the two countries sometimes: a bit where Wong recalls spinning his poor exam results to a disbelieving father seemed perfect fodder for his act in China (the pressures of the country’s education system, a filial son, a punchline involving math), but “for some reason, I've never been able to make it work in Chinese.”

If Wong and Rowswell have one thing in common, it’s experience, which translates easily to recognition. This year, Wong’s stand-up show sold out a large Shanghai theater, even when seats cost as much as 800 RMB ($120). Meanwhile, Dashan—Rowswell’s stage name—is probably as familiar in China as Master Kong instant noodles or the CCTV nightly news.

Not many performers can claim to be an overnight sensation; Rowswell literally was. After appearing on a televised crosstalk skit in 1988, playing the character Dashan, or ‘Big Mountain,’ he awoke to learn his audience numbered more than half a billion, most of whom had never seen a foreigner speaking Chinese. Within years, Rowswell and his character had become one.

But appearing on television while China was still in its post-1989 pariah period cost him dearly in the eyes of some foreigners, notably writer Peter Hessler, who criticized Rowswell as a “trained monkey” in his book River Town: “[M]ost waiguoren [foreigners] in China hated Da Shan,” Hessler wrote. “The more your Chinese improved … the more you heard about Da Shan and how much better than you he was.”

“That criticism is entirely rooted in a Western media narrative that is simply not shared or even understood by Chinese audiences,” Rowswell says. “If it was immoral to come to China in 1990, why was it suddenly moral in 1995 or even 2014? What changed, other than the passage of time dulling memories? It’s an entirely false sense of morality.”

As a result of their fame, Rowswell and Wong can persuade ordinary Chinese, who’d normally be more comfortable with crosstalk, to give stand-up a shot. As Rowswell took questions from the audience at the bookstore in Beijing, one middle-aged woman said she knew that “foreign comics” were prone to “yellow”—sexual—humor and swearing, but had incorrectly assumed that this would not be case with Dashan, who’d sprinkled cracks about former President Jiang Zemin’s mistress and Dongguan’s infamous sex trade into his routine, and even dropped a couple of F-bombs. (She still claimed to have enjoyed herself.)

The other key to their success has been reinvention, something they share with another well-known (Irish-born, Brooklyn-bred) local comic, Des Bishop, who’s spent the past year in Beijing mastering Mandarin for a documentary with Irish broadcaster RTE, Des Bishop Breaking China. The serendipity of three professionals plying Chinese comedy at the same time has proven something of an adrenaline shot to the local scene, which, until recently, has mostly consisted of weekly open-mics in sleepy hutong bars.