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Jami Gong is on a mission to make Hong Kong Asia’s capital of comedy, writes Clare Morin

Jami Gong is a man on a mission – he has ambitious dreams to cultivate American style stand-up comedy in Asia – and looking at the rate he’s moving, he could very well succeed soon. You may have met the New York Chinatown native at his headquarters – the TakeOut Comedy Club in Elgin Street, Soho. Lurking in a basement space down a rickety old staircase, his club has provided fertile ground for a generation of Hong Kong stand-up comics to emerge. This fortnight you can see them in all their glory as the 2^nd Annual HK International Comedy Festival kicks off.

I meet Gong in a Wan Chai coffee shop, where he explains how his mission began during a fateful trip to Hong Kong in 2002. He was flying to Hong Kong to visit his dying grandmother, and whilst in the air (and allegedly the exact moment that his grandma left the earthly realm) an idea flew into his mind. He would save Chinatown’s crumbling nightlife scene in the wake of the 9/11 attack on New York, by launching a comedy series. TakeOut Comedy was thus born.

In 2005, Gong moved his concept to Hong Kong, after he realised that there was the strange lack of a comedy club here. He rented a basement space in Elgin Street, and set about teaching stand-up comedy for free. “I figured that when you open a comedy club, you need two things: an audience and comedians. You’re never going to get an audience unless you have good comedians. I started teaching, to nurture these guys. I thought if I build it, it will come.”

And they came. By 2007, Gong felt confident enough to raise the ante and launch the HK International Comedy Festival. His aim is to create the world’s next big comedy festival – in the tradition of the world’s best, such as Melbourne, Edinburgh and Montreal. “They started somewhere,” he says. “Who’s to say in ten years we won’t be competing with those guys? There are three things that unite the world: sports, music and comedy. Comedy has the most potential over here in Asia. When I tell people we’re the first comedy club in Asia, people think there are more. I’m taking it to a whole new level that has never been done before.”

Further reading: How to win a comedy competiion

Last year was a huge success; the most intriguing outcome was the discovery of Vivek Mahbubani – an inspired Cantonese-speaking comic who won the Chinese division. This year the competition is open to entries from around the world, but the majority taking part are Hong Kong-based (with the exception of a keen South Korea based comic who is flying himself in).

The English section of the competition is held over two nights of preliminaries, where contestants get a seven-minute chance before a live audience. The two winners of both nights then go into the finals. The scores are awarded according to originality, stage presence and audience reaction. The Chinese division is noticeably smaller, with only a handful of contestants. Yet, Gong believes that Cantonese comics are the future. “I knew this was going to take time. I had to hit the English first, and then hit the Chinese. I knew with time it would grow, there’s only 60,000 expats here, but seven million Chinese.”

Headlining the finals of this year’s festival is a king of the American comedy competition circuit, Tom Cotter. With his rapid-fire comedic style, Cotter is a competition master, having won at the Boston and Las Vegas comedy festivals, and most recently ‘Best of the Fest’ at the Montreal Comedy Festival. We catch him over a phone from New York. “I’m just swallowing a pill,” he says from the back of a cab, as it races to Kennedy Airport. Cotter admits that despite his success, comedy competitions are a highly subjective affair. “In the States it’s another feather in your cap, but to be honest how do you compare two comedians and say which one is better? You may like them as a person, they’re always very arbitrary, and I’ve been lucky to come out okay a couple of times.”

Yet he says that Gong’s work in Asia is impressive: “I think it’s great and he needs to be commended. I’m a huge proponent of comedy. Firstly it’s the best date thing ever, someone else does the talking for you so you don’t have that awkwardness, and when you can sit next to someone and laugh that’s such a great bonding moment… laughter is the best medicine as we say in the United States… although Codeine is also very good.”

Further reading: How to win a comedy competiion

The 2^nd Annual HK International Comedy Festival, Fri 10 – Sat 18. More info: 6220 4436 and hkcomedyfestival.com.