The Brief

Comedians need a space to workshop their jokes — that’s universal.

So on a recent Saturday afternoon at the Tang Dynasty restaurant in San Gabriel, a handful of stand up performers were slinging their stuff at an open mic.

In Mandarin Chinese.

Liting Chen was third in the lineup, a self-proclaimed neophyte with a firm grasp of comedic timing.

"It's actually my third time doing Chinese stand up," Chen began. She then turned to a laowai — or foreigner — in the audience.

"Your Chinese is better than mine," she continued, and asked him where he learned it.

Online, from a teacher who lives in Southern China, he replied.

Chen interrupted him with a small apologetic laugh. "I don't understand," she said.

Liting Chen performs at a Chinese open mic event in San Gabriel.

(

Iris Ouyang

)

How to slay in Chinese

Welcome to Re-educated Comedy, a series of Chinese stand up shows and open mics in Los Angeles, where roasts, heckling, jokes that land and those that don't are all part of the experience. Just like they would be in English.

Re-educated is the brainchild of Lewis Liu, who works with Chinese-speaking entertainers, including film and TV professionals and social media influencers. In late 2023, Liu said a couple of his clients had wanted to do comedy in Chinese, but were bemoaning the lack of opportunities in L.A.

So like any good producer, Liu put an event together about a month later — a mixer and a stand-up show with a handful of performers in downtown. It packed the house.

"Because we had food, people showed up for that," Liu said. "Some people probably showed up for the comedians."

The audience is there

In March 2024, Re-educated had its first ticketed stand-up only show at a 140-seat comedy club. The first half of the sold-out performance was in English. The second, Chinese. It was bilingual, Liu said, because there weren't enough Chinese comics around.

There was another challenge.

"After our first show, our comedians were telling me, 'Lewis, it's great that we have a show, but we're running out of material,'" Liu said.

So they asked him to add free open mics to the programming.

"Having a small live audience really helps them test out the material," Liu said.

And all jokes are welcome at Re-educated Comedy. If the brand sounds like a political jab, Liu said to think of it more as a double entendre.

"When you come to a new country, you learn about the new things in the new world," said Liu, who came to the U.S. from central China more than a decade ago. "You essentially get reeducated."

As to any additional meaning, Liu said, "we let the audience interpret how they see it."

This year, the series is expanding from quarterly to monthly, with a mix of open mics and ticketed shows. As word about Re-educated gets out, more comedians are joining, from total newbies to bilingual comics who first cut their teeth in English stand-up.

Liting Chen, who roasted the guy in the audience at Tang Dynasty, started performing stand-up in English about a year-and-a-half ago and considers herself firmly in the bilingual camp. She learned about Re-educated from a fellow Chinese comic, went to her first show at the end of last year, and took the plunge shortly after.

" I was shocked to see there are so many Chinese-speaking [people in the] audience. Like, they're real people; they're not comics," Chen said.

In comparison, the audience of most English open mics she's been part of are other comics, waiting for their turn to go up.

Chen, who immigrated to the U.S. from northern China about a decade ago, said it's been interesting trying to figure out what makes the two different crowds tick.

"I don't think it translates," she said, bringing up a conversation she recently had with another bilingual comedian. "We feel like when we speak different languages, like Chinese and English, we switch our personality, we become another person."

Sliding between cultures

Jesse Appell, known in the Chinese-speaking stand up world as Ai Jiexi, performs at the open mic in San Gabriel.

(

Fiona Ng

/

LAist

)

In between sets at Tang Dynasty, a comic with a close-cropped head of curls jumps on stage to work the crowd of about 30 people. His name is Jesse Appell, but he goes by another name in the Chinese stand-up scene.

"My name is Ai Jiexi," Appell said to the audience. "When you look at my face, you probably don't know where I am from. Well, I am a Dongbei ren."

Dongbei ren means someone who's from northeastern China.

"America's Northeast," Appell delivered the punchline. "I'm from Boston."

About 15 years ago, the Bostonian went to Beijing to study Chinese. He was already dabbling in improv in the U.S., and decided to check out the comedy scene in China. He discovered an old-school style of comedy known as xiangsheng — or crosstalk — that goes back some two centuries. A couple of years later, he returned to China on the Fulbright fellowship to research Chinese comedy, with the ulterior motive to study with the only crosstalk master in the country that would take on foreign disciples.

From there, Appell started to make a career for himself in China as a stand-up comic, performing some 300 shows in one year, including on Royal Caribbean cruises, a popular Chinese internet knock-off of SNL, and at his own comedy club in Beijing.

"Then I came home to the States for what I thought would be a nine-day vacation, and COVID hit in midair," Appell said. "I found myself locked back in America after having not lived here for basically my whole adult life."

Which pretty much sums up one major theme across his jokes.  "A lot of my comedy in Mandarin and even in English comes down to being this person that lives between the two worlds," Appell said.

A global phenomenon

Despite the vast Chinese-speaking diaspora in Southern California, the local Chinese comedy scene isn’t as developed as other cities. Re-educated's Liu said stand-up comedy started blowing up in China and Taiwan in the late 2010s, with variety and late night-type shows devoted to the artform.

" I actually was not surprised there's an audience out there for Chinese-language comedy," Liu said, referring to Los Angeles. "Because of the popularity of these shows, there are many other Chinese language comedy clubs that started to pop out around the world."

New York, Seattle, Vancouver, Toronto, the Silicon Valley, according to Liu, all have their own spots.

But what Los Angeles has is the San Gabriel Valley.

" The SGV is different," said Appell, who has performed in a number of Chinese-speaking communities, including in Paris, London and Seattle. He calls it a kind of cultural confidence that he hasn't seen elsewhere, like the fact that the signage of an entire mall could be in Chinese, the fact that zero thoughts are given to whether you know the language.

"I feel like [in] the SGV, people are living their life and they're thriving and they're doing what they want," Appell said.

Details for the next show

Re-educated Comedy
Date: Saturday, Feb. 22
Time: English stand-up: 7 – 9 p.m. Chinese stand-up: 9 - 11 p.m.
Venue: Happy Humble Hub, 117 East Main Street #Unit A & B, Alhambra
Tickets: Starting at $28.52

Rep. Marjorie Taylor Greene, the Georgia Republican who rose to prominence as one of President Donald Trump's biggest defenders and recently became one of his biggest critics, is leaving Congress.

Greene's announcement late Friday that she would resign effective Jan. 5, 2026, is the latest escalation of months of clashes with the president over his second term agenda – including the release of the Epstein files.

"Standing up for American women who were raped at 14, trafficked and used by rich powerful men, should not result in me being called a traitor and threatened by the President of the United States, whom I fought for," Greene wrote in a lengthy statement shared online.

The third-term Congresswoman also said it would not be fair to her northwest Georgia district, one of the most conservative in the country, to have them "endure a hurtful and hateful primary against me by the President we all fought for" while noting that "Republicans will likely lose the midterms."

Greene is one of a record 40 House members and 10 senators who have indicated they do not plan to return to their seats after the 2026 election, joining a number of lawmakers who are retiring or running for a different office.
Copyright 2025 NPR

Los Angeles County District Attorney Nathan Hochman filed a motion Friday in Superior Court to dismiss manslaughter charges against two Torrance police officers who fatally shot a Black man in possession of an air rifle in 2018.

Hochman argued in court documents that prosecutors can’t meet the legal standard of proof needed for the officers to be convicted of a crime.

The court has not yet ruled on the matter.

The details

Officers Matthew Concannon and Anthony Chavez were indicted in 2023 in connection with the killing of Christopher Deandre Mitchell, 23, who was suspected of stealing a car.

As the officers approached the car, they saw what was later revealed to be an air rifle between Mitchell’s legs. When Mitchell appeared to reach for the rifle,the officers opened fire, according to police.

The backstory

Former District Attorney Jackie Lacey declined to file charges against the officers in 2019, saying they reasonably believed Mitchell had a gun. Her successor George Gascón, elected in 2020 on a platform of police accountability, assigned a special prosecutor to review the case. The special prosecutor sought the criminal indictment.

When Hochman took office in 2024, he appointed a new special prosecutor, who recommended the charges be dropped.

“We cannot move forward in good faith with prosecuting these two officers because we cannot prove beyond a reasonable doubt with admissible evidence that the officers unreasonably believed they were in imminent danger when they saw what looked like a sawed-off shotgun or rifle between Mr. Mitchell’s legs and his hands moved toward the weapon just before the officers shot,” the statement read.

The courts

Los Angeles County Superior Court Judge Sam Ohta did not immediately make a ruling Friday on the motion to dismiss the charges, saying the state Supreme Court is also considering the case.

The state Supreme Court is considering an appeal filed by one of the officer’s attorneys after Ohta rejected an earlier motion to dismiss by the defense.

As the Palisades Fire was still burning in January, residents saw an eye-grabbing headline: the Santa Ynez reservoir, perched directly above the Palisades, was offline for repairs and empty.

The reservoir’s closure frustrated residents and spurred Gov. Gavin Newsom to announce a state investigation into whether the reservoir being full of water would have made a difference fighting the deadly fire.

After months of analysis, California agencies including the state’s EPA, Cal Fire and the Department of Water Resources issued a report confirming the explanations given by local officials and experts in the aftermath of the fire: the water supply was too slow, not too low — and even a functioning reservoir likely wouldn’t have done much in the face of an unprecedented natural disaster.

Why the hydrants stopped working

The report found that not even a full reservoir positioned uphill from the Palisades Fire could have maintained water pressure and stopped the unprecedented disaster.

“The water system lost pressure, not due to a lack of water supply in the system, but because of an insufficient flow rate,” the report states.

A reservoir perched at a high elevation, such as the Santa Ynez, can serve an important role in maintaining water pressure for hydrants throughout the system. As water gets used downhill, water from the reservoir flows to pressure towers. Because of gravity and limitation on flow rates, the pressure towers can't be refilled at the same pace as they are drained. Meanwhile, the reservoir dries up.

In the case of the Palisades Fire, the report states, a full reservoir would have helped keep water pressure up for only a short time.

The report noted that the exact data on the demand on the Los Angeles Department of Water and Power’s system was missing.

However, investigators found that based on experiences with other fires, the high demand across the system meant it was “unlikely that [the reservoir] could have helped maintain pressure for very long.”

The system’s design

The report found that the closure of the Santa Ynez Reservoir was in line with the primary purpose of L.A.’s water infrastructure: maintaining a clean drinking water supply. The reservoir repairs were prompted by a damaged cover. The repairs, the report notes, were required by federal and state laws on drinking water safety.

More broadly, municipal water systems like L.A.’s weren’t built to fight wildfires, as LAist reported in January.

“This report confirms what we and others have been saying more broadly regarding water system expectations and capabilities, but does so completely independently and with new details specific to the L.A. fires,” Greg Pierce, the director of UCLA’s Human Right to Water Solutions Lab, said in an email to LAist.

What’s next

The report makes two major recommendations: continue to follow the California Wildfire and Forest Resilience Action Plan, and make sure firefighters in the state are positioned for year-round fires.

The state stopped short of recommending any changes to L.A.’s municipal infrastructure. Water experts like Pierce say massive amounts of water and a very expensive redesign of L.A.’s water system would be needed to keep fire hydrants working during large urban conflagrations.

For their part, researchers and others have been looking into other solutions, including putting more utility lines underground and redistributing water across the system.

The report about the reservoir comes on the heels of a separate report from the Fire Safety Research Institute about the timeline leading up to and during the January firestorm. That report, which was commissioned by the California governor's office, contains a detailed account of the Palisades and Eaton fires' progressions and emergency services' responses on Jan. 7 and 8.

As for the Santa Ynez Reservoir, the repairs to fix its broken cover and make it usable again are slated to begin in June and finish by May 2027.