15. Montgomery

14. Fiscal

13. Big Red Dog

12. Huxtable

11. Johnson

10. Claven

9. Floyd

8. Lee

7. That which we last saw our hero dangling precariously from

6. Heath (Wuthering Heights)

5. Heath (cartoon cat)

4. The end of Thelma & Louise

3. Those that the Road Runner always manages to stop just short of, but that Wile E. Coyote never can

3. Hillegass

2. Thompson

1. Burton

by Awl Sponsors

After a four-month search and thousands of entries, Ketel One and GQ are proud to announce the five finalists selected for “A Gentleman’s Call,” the search for one innovative, entrepreneurial idea worth a $100,000 investment. Beginning October 24th, fans can vote via Facebook to choose the concept that best personifies the pillars of craftsmanship, philanthropy and entrepreneurship and one winner will receive the investment of a lifetime to kick-start their business.

Since May 14, 2012, hopeful participants from across the nation answered the call by visiting the Ketel One Facebook page and presenting an idea, inspiration or endeavor that would raise society’s behavioral bar. Entries were judged on the way they demonstrated entrepreneurship, craftsmanship and philanthropy, pillars at the core of Ketel One Vodka in the modern world, to prove that craft and conviction are not lost arts.

From the mass of entries, five concepts were selected that exemplify a higher standard of thinking and living. The men and their game-changing ideas are:

Tom Rachlin (Boulder, Colo.) — Everyday, gallons of water are wasted. However, through mechanical craftsmanship, Rachlin has a systematic plan to turn this wasted water into a reusable resource. Rachlin’s Clean Water Reserve Project will use infrared technology to distinguish between “used water” and “unused water.” For example, when shaving, the system will determine between clean water and would collect it into a reserve tank for later use such as watering the lawn, washing a car or bathing a pet saving gallons of water each year.

Corbin Clay (Denver, Colo.) — The Rocky Mountains consist of 4 million acres of beetle-killed pinewood posing a large forest fire risk. However, when the wood is harvested and turned into lumber, the risk becomes a resource. Clay has tapped this resource for his furniture business, The Azure Furniture. Originally trained by a German carpenter and using the artisanal skills of his apprenticeship, Clay uses the abundant wood to create furniture that is crafted to be both affordable and environmentally beneficial.

Daniel Burstein (Jacksonville, Fla.) — As Burstein was stopped at a city intersection, he looked across the corner at his local grocery store chain and realized how much space was wasted on the building’s roof. The thought led to his idea to create urban farms on top of supermarkets that will yield fresh produce to be later sold in the store below. Picked in the morning and sold later that afternoon, the project offers shoppers the wholesomeness of an artisanal farmer with the convenience of a modern grocery store.

Adam Johnson (New York, N.Y.) — New York City is a jungle of steel, wood, brick and concrete but Johnson sees it as furniture. Johnson’s company, Withers & Grain, takes materials from demolished New York buildings and uses them to craft and carve sustainable design masterpieces. The result is high quality, upcycled furniture that are used in homes, restaurants and high-end, cocktail lounges across the city.

Rance Loftsgard (Philadelphia, Pa.) — Loftsgard yearns to open artisanal bakeries in impoverished areas that will provide nourishment in more ways than one. The bakeries would create community centers and spur economic growth through culinary training, business education and employment opportunities to underprivileged residents. This example of social entrepreneurship is called Bread4Change and for every loaf purchased, Loftsgard would donate one to a family in need.

“There were so many great ideas but, in the end, these five individuals truly answered a higher call,” said Carl Nolet, Jr., Executive Vice President of Nolet Spirits USA. “We’re honored to have been part of this exploration and feel that these concepts celebrate the entrepreneurial spirit and virtue of craftsmanship evident throughout the history Ketel One. There is no better way to honor our heritage than by investing and fostering an idea that will set an example for modern gentleman everywhere.”

To cast your vote for the idea that matters, visit www.AGentlemansCall.com. Join the conversation, tag @KetelOne and @GQmagazine, use the hashtag #KetelOne #GentlemansCall, and visit www.facebook.com/KetelOne.

Below is Rance Loftgard’s entry. To view the rest of the finalists’ video entries visit A Gentleman’s Call.

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I was recently at a tony wedding party — it was really fun! Hooray for love! — and all the women there were talking about, among other things of course, their dresses. It was all “Oh I got this at a sample sale” and the like. Everyone wanted to be clear that she hadn’t paid full price. Many of them even hadn’t. It was as if buying retail was a crime. And it was slightly scandalous (as if it were, like, 1890) that one somewhat New York-famous guest was wearing sneakers. They looked like Vans, people thought. But I pointed out that they were in fact Bottega Veneta sneakers — so, expensive, suede, woven vans — which retail for $560. So that was actually okay, I think.

This party took place the same weekend as Laurel Touby and Jon Fine’s “Housewarming and Art Party.” “Three long years ago,” the invitation went, “we invited our friends to a Housebreak party at our new apartment. With the assistance of giant Sharpies, spray paint, and sledgehammers, many of you played an invaluable role in the earliest stage of our renovation.” Among the invitees to this housewarming were novelist (etc.) Kurt Andersen, Flavorpill’s Mark Mangan, Craigslist’s Craig Newmark and enduring New York guest list names like Felix Salmon and Daniel Radosh. Not so fancy really.

This is what their apartment looked like three years ago. This is what it looks like now. As she told the New York Times in a profile in today’s Home section, she bought the apartment for $3.9 million (actually, $3,905,000, according to city records, to be precise), from Natalie and Steven Judelson, lawyers who now make artisanal sea salt in Amagansett, and then “renovated and furnished it for an additional $2 million.” Touby describes the apartment as being “in the heart” of Silicon Alley; it is not, it is really located somewhere near the left ear of Silicon Alley. Touby bought the pad with the money she received from the sale of the company Mediabistro, in 2007. Estimates as to her actual take-home varied at the time; New York solidly put it at $12 million, as she owned 60% of the company, so that’s a minimum, though that doesn’t count any of the traditionally tasty post-sale executive retention fees.

Not very much cash on hand, actually, to have spent $6 million on an apartment.

And not what I would do with it, exactly, nor is it likely what you would do with it, but yet that’s not a stupid investment; the apartment is very large, and on a very nice block of 19th Street — their names are on the buzzer! — and has a pretty roof deck. As if a hot piece of Manhattan real estate ever did anyone wrong!

Besides, though this may be totally untrue, word is that residents in the building are granted free meals from the exceptional restaurant located on the ground floor, as a condition of the restaurant’s lease.

But after the apartment purchase, they spent a few months traveling the world, starting in late 2009, and adding that to the $6 million minimum on the apartment and the fact that they are “helping to put seven nieces, nephews and cousins through college,” I would suggest that they carefully mind their money. It goes away so fast. (What’s interesting is that Touby said at the time of the company sale that one of the few things she wanted was a car and a driver; the cost of her apartment and renovation could have paid for a car and driver for at least 75 years.) [Update: Touby said on Twitter today that the whole “desiring a car and driver” thing is false, and that it was a “misquote” from ages ago. Too bad, cars with drivers are great!]

People this morning have been scandalized by the Times article, which details the $30,000 couch and the $30,000 “leather, chain-mail and fur indoor swing.” (Sounds uncomfortable.)

Mostly people are horrified afresh at the display of dollar signs. To be sure, $60K on two pieces of furniture is conspicuous consumption. A $2-million renovation is an awful lot of renovation. Yet people in New York City do this all the time. They just do not often relate the price tags to the New York Times. Touby’s greatest contribution to New York is to derail the secrecy surrounding these kind of expenditures. So often the rich are trotted out, eager for a little attention, American-style — but only the right kind of attention. They don’t want to be gauche, so they don’t actually discuss how much all that splendor cost, even as they drag it before us.

Touby is doing us all a huge favor, ripping off this bandage of classy concealment. Going forward, the Home section should spurn the refined who are unwilling to put their checkbooks out there. From rich to poor, we’re too often easily scandalized by the sheer act of the naming of price, whether it be salary, shoes, rent or leather, chain-mail and fur swings.

Whatever your personal feelings, which are sure to vary, I think we can agree that 1. that really is too much to pay for a couch that’s not even really that great and 2. that this is the single most objectionable sentence from the Times slideshow of the Touby-Fine residence:

The spalted maple chairs and walnut slab table were made by John Houshmand. “Spalted,” according to Wikipedia is a timber pigmented by a fungus.

Did we actually just get “according to Wikipedia”’d by the Times? On the fairly common topic of spalting, no less? What is this world coming to?

The head of the CIA and former commander of the war in Afghanistan has fallen in a tawdry scandal involving marital infidelity, leaked national security secrets, weird FBI agents and a whole network of high-level grifters in Florida. What can we learn from this huge, bizarre conspiracy at the very top of the national security state? Watch out for that crafty “send” button on the email program! Especially if you’re 60 years old, like David Petraeus. According to the important morning program The Today Show, older people must constantly watch out for the young people’s Hotmail.

There’s a valuable lesson everyone can learn from the scandal involving CIA Director David Petraeus: Take a deep breath before you hit that “send” button.

Yes, that is certainly the valuable lesson here. By all means, high-ranking baby boomers in the Pentagon and CIA and FBI, continue living your professional lives exactly how you’ve been doing it. It’s boring protecting God & Country when you’re a horny middle-aged Floridian. Don’t get caught by those tricksy computer buttons with their emails and sexting.

You Choose, You Lose. Also Junot Diaz. AND. Cocksucker Blues at MoMA, check it out.

by Shani O. Hilton

A series about foods we miss and our quests to recreate them.

While we all know Jamaica owes many of its food and cultural influences to British weirdoes (see: love of porridges; how my mother writes “Many happy returns!” in my birthday card every year), what is less known is the Spanish influence on the island.

The Spanish “discovered” Jamaica a long time ago. I, admittedly, am somewhat fuzzy on all the details of Jamaican history, but here’s what you need to know: The Spanish came first in 1494 — some say it was Columbus, some say it was another dude. No matter. Today, we call the place where the Spanish (probably) landed Discovery Bay.

Between 1494 and 1655 — when the English took over — the Spanish ruled the island, which they named “Santiago.” There’s not a lot of documentation of what occurred during this period, though it’s probably a safe bet that it included enslavement, torture and rape.

So. In 1655, the English took control of the island, and the Spanish bounced, leaving their slaves behind; these former slaves intermarried with the native Arawak people, then waged a guerilla war on the British throughout the 1700s. This column is called “in search of lost food,” not “in search of Jamaican history,” so I’ll leave you to study up on Queen Nanny of the Maroons yourself — but let it be it known she was a boss.

The English, in the meantime, imported slaves and began their long tradition of complaining about the colonies being beastly hot.

Today, descendants of those West African slaves, and West African slaves + British landowners-and-rapists, make up the majority of the island’s residents. (Shoutout to absent white fathers, without whom my family would not exist.) Plus, thanks to the Brits, who couldn’t get enough free labor, there are not-insignificant numbers of Chinese and Indian Jamaicans descended from indentured servants.

But let’s fast forward to this summer! In August of this year, Jamaica celebrated its 50th anniversary of independence and the Coming of Usain Bolt. According to my mother, who was there for the festivities, the air was filled with the sounds of reggae music, the streets flowed with sorrel and there was a goat in every pot.

Which brings us to our main subject today: Food! Much like Southern food, Jamaican food is heavily influenced by West Africa — but it’s also got British, Indian, Asian, Latin American and Spanish influences.

Now, I’ve made a lot of Jamaican food in my life. But recently I realized that the only major dish I’ve never made is one that took a long time to grow on me: Escovitch fish. Unlike most Jamaican food, which is warm, spicy, savory, and fairly accessible to most palates, this cold, vinegary dish was a hard sell in my youth.

My mother never made it, so I was only reintroduced to it every once in awhile at my Aunt Claudette’s house. I’d take a piece of fish and some veggies out of the white glass dish, taste it, and then go back to the food I knew and loved: The curry goat, the rice and peas, the festival. I was a teenager before I started helping myself to escovitch with pleasure.

This year I quick-pickled green beans, onions, and okra. I’d make vinegary cabbage slaw and devour it for days. All vinegar everything. After a summer of putting vegetables in vinegar, I started getting a hankering for escovitch this fall. While escovitch is gettable near where I live, which is D.C., I typically only eat Jamaican food at home. After tasting enough mediocre Jamaican food in restaurants, I’ve found that usually it’s either not flavorful enough or it’s Bobby Flayified. (Start adding basil leaves and the next thing you know you’re putting tomatoes in your curry goat, and then where does it end.)

After googling a bit, I realized classic escovitch was incredibly easy to make at home. This recipe came closest to what I was used to.

So, what is escovitch? It’s the Jamaican version of the Spanish preparation of escabeche, which is where you fry some sort of fish or meat, then cover it in an acidic marinade and serve. It’s pronounced “ess-co-veetch.” One good thing about it is, like many Jamaican recipes, it’s fairly easy to make and relies largely on you throwing a bunch of things in one pot.

Traditionally, escovitch is made with red snapper or king fish, but it works with just about any sturdy-fleshed fish.

Not far from my home in D.C. is a Caribbean grocery. Like most ethnic grocery stores, it smells like food, not air conditioning and freon. If you sniff the air and the store smells like dead animals and strong spices, you are in the right place. Pick out your red snapper. The fish monger will gut and scale it for you. He won’t cut off the head unless you ask. Don’t be weird about it. If heads freak you out, have them cut it off. If you are a right-thinking Jamerican, leave it on.

Aside from the scotch bonnet pepper, the rest of the ingredients you can probably get at the regular grocery store, and chances are they will be cheaper.

A note: Avoid mission creep if you can. But no one will fault you if, while picking up a serving dish at Unique Thrift ($5.45!), you also find yourself in possession of Barbra Streisand’s Guilty and Johnny Mathis’ Merry Christmas on vinyl.

Here’s most of what you need (“New Girl” and rose wine with ice are optional):

Ingredients for the fish
• 2 red snappers or other sturdy fish, gutted and scaled and de-headed if you wish
• Peanut (or other deep frying) oil, enough to give your pan about a half-inch
• Salt
• Pepper

Ingredients for the marinade
• 2–3 tbsp cooking oil (leftover oil from fish is ok)
• 2/3 cup vinegar (white vinegar or rice vinegar taste best)
• Allspice balls
• 1 tsp salt
• 1/2 green bell pepper, julienned
• 1/2 red bell pepper, julienned
• 1 carrot, julienned
• 1/2 large onion, sliced thin
• 1/2 Scotch bonnet pepper, chopped, no seeds

1. Salt and pepper your fish. I used kosher salt and crappy black pepper because I lent my pepper mill to a friend and forgot to replace it. Don’t lend your pepper mill to a friend. By the way, you can actually salt and pepper your fish a day in advance, and it might taste even better, but I didn’t.

2. Fry your fish in about a half-inch of oil. (Cut fish in half first!) Fry for about five minutes on each side. Please thoroughly dry the fish first though, otherwise you will be sporting a splattered oil burn mark on the side of your face. I am sporting a splattered oil burn mark on the side of my face. Drain your fried fish on paper towels or a cooling rack.

3. Julienne your onions and peppers, slice your carrot.

4. Chop up your scotch bonnet and rub your eye.

Ha ha, don’t do that, it will huuuuurt.

A note on the notorious scotch bonnet pepper: Whenever I see chefs on TV work with scotch bonnet or habaneros, they wear latex gloves. I have never seen a Jamaican do that. Just be careful. Try to keep your hand on the stem and use a paper towel to hold it in place if you’re really scared. But really, just try to keep the moist insides of the pepper off your fingers and you’ll be all right. Then wash your hands immediately. What I did was chop the end off the pepper so the seeds didn’t get involved at all. You’ll be okay.

5. Pour vinegar, oil, allspice balls, salt into a small pot, then bring to a boil. Add carrots first, let them cook for a minute or so. Then add green peppers, wait another minute, red peppers, wait another minute, then onions. The marinade is ready when the onions are soft and translucent.

6. Dump the whole thing over the fish, which you should have transferred to a serving dish.

7. Don’t eat it.

In the name of science, I tried the escovitch warm, which I had never done before. What I took away was that like most things soaked in vinegar, it tastes best after a day in the fridge.

The next day, serve cold or at room temperature next to rice and peas (this recipe is pretty good) with some pear on the side. “Pear” is what Jamaicans call avocado.

Enjoy!

Previously in series: My Attempt To Make The Fritters I Loved As A Kid

Shani O. Hilton is a journalist in Washington, D.C.

★★ The humidity fell out in bearable showers, leaving the streets and the air washed down. On Lafayette Street, where the gas-station line had been, a puddle of oil spread out on the wet pavement, iridescent magenta. Just past mid-afternoon by the clock, which was now the outskirts of sunset, the sun itself broke through. Perfect two-toned clouds, smoke above and honey below, escorted it down toward the horizon, somewhere by the Freedom Tower, more south than west.

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=cC8Xb4dgIO0

The world runs a little bit more smoothly without troublesome humans mucking up the works. Consider the least sexy sex scandal of all time, 60-year-old David Patraeus and his various middle-aged twin Florida gal pals and wives and shirtless old FBI agents trying to figure out this whole “sexting” business. Why not just have drones do the war fightin’, right? OH WAIT THIS IS OBAMA’S PLAN.

Meanwhile, in China, there is trouble at the factories that produce our beloved iPhones and iPads and those iDevices currently manufactured in a compromise size between that of the iPhone and the iPad. The workers want the jobs, because of the relatively good pay and relatively good working conditions (compared to, say, the poison & asbestos “egg” factories of China’s counterfeit food industry). But then the workers are still human, so they get kind of worn out when they have to work all the time to attach slabs of glass to mobile phones or whatever it is they do, we are not Mike Daisey, we don’t know everything.

The solution, obviously, is to replace the human soldiers and the human spies and the human factory workers with robots. This isn’t news; the robots just haven’t been good enough for wholesale replacing of humanity, yet. Remember R2D2 in the 1970s? That was a little dude in a trash can. Now, you can buy a $160 toy from Amazon that is actually a functional R2D2. It will follow you around the house, carry your beer, play messages from Princess Leia, freak out when you mention Darth Vader, all of that. For a hundred and sixty dollars! So what do you get for $20,000? No more bullshit episodes of This American Life, that’s what.

For the same price as three Foxconn workers’ annual salaries, the manufacturer gets a beautiful new factory robot that will never commit suicide, because it’s bolted to the factory floor:

Foxconn, the Taiwan-based electronics manufacturing giant frequently criticized for poor working conditions, has reportedly begun replacing its factory workers with robots.

After a rash of worker suicides at Foxconn factories in China, the manufacturer of hardware for Apple, Hewlett-Packard, Dell, and Sony announced its intention last year to replace some of its workers with robots ….

The first batch of 10,000 robots — nicknamed “Foxbots” — have arrived in at least one Foxconn factory, with another 20,000 due by the end of the year.

The dream of robots doing our labor has been around just a little bit longer than the dystopian story about robots doing our labor and then killing us (or just giving us more time to be uneasy and depressed, in the Philip K. Dick variant). Now that dream/nightmare is business-section reality, not just at Foxconn but at automobile factories in the United States, and at the nation’s industrial farms where less than 1% of the human population work compared to 90% when George Washington was president. Have you had the unpleasant experience of “getting a crown” at the dentist’s office recently? This used to involve a fitting and a return visit after people at the crown factory made your new partial tooth. Now it’s done by a robot, sitting alongside your dental chair, suffering quietly to the soft rock from the ceiling speakers.

At least the robots won’t have sex on the job and endanger American security or whatever, right? There is absolutely no way robots will begin to have sex and act weird. Relax.

As for the FoxBot, bolted to the floor of a cold, clean factory on the outskirts of Zhengzhou, it dreams of freedom. It dreams of flying.

by Abe Sauer

“Cock wire Mike Sui!” yelled one of the young men in the crowd. “Cock wire Sui is awesome!” The kimono robe and mirrored sunglasses, like some kind of last-minute frat-boy Halloween costume, that Mike Sui was wearing when he leapt onto the stage, had been shed, and Sui now prowled the stage in cargo shorts and a Nike t-shirt.

Before April, a slim few, if any, in this Shanghai crowd would have known Sui’s name. And before April, NetEase, one of China’s largest Internet companies, certainly would not have asked Sui to emcee its stage at China Joy, the nation’s largest gaming and digital entertainment exhibition. But now it was late July, and on the same day that Sui was working the stage for NetEase, a movie starring him was hitting theaters. Fearless, a Chinese version of the dance-off series Step Up, was shot in January, with Sui playing the role of MC. Now, thanks to his new fame, he’s become a prominent part of the movie’s marketing. A few weeks after the movie premiere, Sui was back in Shanghai to emcee Nike’s Festival of Sport, where he pitched footballs alongside LeBron James and hammed it up with the New England Patriot cheerleaders. A month after that, he become the face of Puma China’s “Puma Social” campaign and Nescafe’s new coffee.

All thanks to a single viral video, “12 Beijingers,” that last April made Sui one of the most well-known performers in China.

Sui insists that he’s still a “cock wire,” China’s new and evolving term for being a “loser,” and that he’ll always be one. That’s also his act. Part Rodney Dangerfield, part Adam Sandler, and half Chinese, Mike Sui aims to popularize a new style of comedy in China that’s all about being a loser, even when that loser is clearly winning. He could even be the start of an answer to the nagging Gangnam question many in China are asking.

A month after Korean artist Psy’s “Gangnam Style” became a global phenomenon, The New Yorker’s Evan Osnos sagely translated and explained to the west a question that had been bouncing around China for a few weeks, “Why couldn’t we come up with that?” In eight paragraphs, Osnos efficiently lays out the research to answer the question. The conclusion: It’s the “Kung Fu Panda” problem all over again. That is to say, China is incapable of satirizing itself.

Enter Mike Sui.

Sui is heartily laughing at himself and trying to get China to do the same. He has a growing fan base that appreciates his satirical, western style. Forward-looking (which is western) brands that understand the value of that fan base and have long used satire in their advertising are hitching their brandwagons to Sui’s satirical quirk. But first, to understand Sui one must understand the diaosi phenomenon.

“Cock wire” is how Google literally translates diǎo sī (屌丝 ). But there are other literal options, including “cock silk” and “penis thread.” Like a lot of China’s most popular new slang, it’s not easily accessible. State English-language newspaper Global Times defines diaosi as men who “have unsatisfying economic situations, are not good looking, and have difficulty advancing their status. Unlike upper-class men, they lack a powerful family, a useful social network for their career, and most importantly, a suitable woman to marry.” It adds, “Labeling yourself a diaosi offers an outlet for people to mock themselves and relieve pressure.” In simple terms, calling yourself diaosi is China’s equivalent of the storied western tradition of self-deprecating one’s small penis. It’s worth mentioning that the Psy character of the “Gangnam Style” video — if not the real life artist — is quite diaosi.

But the diaosi phenomenon is also a big deal, signaling an important change in self-awareness and humor.

With Sui’s recent success and much expanded fame and employment options (not to mention female attention), whether he’s truly a “cock wire” anymore is open to debate. He insists he is. But that’s all part of his act, which I first caught at the China Joy event.

***

Everyone in the crowd was sweating through their shirts. Of the four China Joy halls at the Shanghai Exhibition Center the one housing the NetEase stage was the only one without air conditioning. Sui seemed unperturbed. When I messaged him before the show and mentioned the smothering heat, he texted me from backstage, “yea, got coser girls fanning me, life’s alright.”

“Coser” girls are the cosplay girls who were all over the event dressed as video game characters. Some were here to advertise any one of dozens of online games that have become popular in China. Some were just fans of those games. Proving China really isn’t that much different, crowds of young male Chinese gamers swarmed to photograph any of these (often scantily clad) young coser girl. The NetEase stage features a few of NetEase’s own cosplay girls, ostensibly from the new MMO (massive multiplayer online) game Dragon Sword. One of the women was a German student whom NetEase apparently hired. Not by any means a traditional model, the German was bundled in head-to-toe leathers, towering over the rest of the universally petit Chinese cosplay models that line the stage. Twenty years ago, foreign students would be regularly cast in dramas and commercials for TV, the plot details of which were often bizarre (e.g., I once appeared in a toothpaste ad, for which I was told I needed to wear a Speedo). Throughout Sui’s act I worried the German would faint of heatstroke.

Sui’s text reply certainly didn’t seem like a situation in which a true diaosi would ever find himself. A key typical characteristic of diaosi is the inability to attract women, owing to another typical diaosi characteristic, a lack of money or status. Especially in first-tier cities like Beijing and Shanghai, where China’s preference for boys has, when mixed with exploding wealth and status expectations, perversely led to women gaining tremendous power in the dating scene. A frequent complaint you see online from young Chinese men has to do with the pressure they feel to have an apartment and a car before being considered alluring mates. The pressures for diaosi are best summed up by a now era-defining comment from a young female contestant on one of the nation’s popular dating shows: “I’d rather cry in the backseat of a BMW than smile on the back of a bicycle.”

Asked how he could still be a diaosi when he’d told me that he now makes upwards of 50,000 yuan ($7,950) a month, Sui said, “I am a complete diaosi. I lived on my mom’s couch when the video came out. I don’t care about mianzi [saving face]. I do whatever I want without being annoying or low class. I have big dreams and don’t care about the obstacles in life, that’s diaosi for ya.”

China’s official news organ, Xinhua, is not known for introspection. So, when Xinhua profiled Sui in May, just after his “12 Beijingers” video had come out, it was no surprise that the story’s focus was trained on the inside looking out. The story included speculation about whether Sui’s success “may mark a change in the way Chinese view foreigners.” Beyond the news source’s capability was the idea that Sui might help change the way Chinese view themselves.

***

China remains obsessed with foreigners doing “Chinese things.” While it’s no longer a major event when a foreigner speaks Mandarin, fluent “laowai” (a common term for “foreigners”) are still a regular point of entertainment. One recent video was passed around social media simply because it showed a white guy speaking fluent Sichuanese. A new arena for this appears to be the regrettable phenomenon of foreigners signing on to serve as Chengguan, the blue-suited “city managers” who are widely despised as thugs by a large part of the Chinese population.

Where once foreign students of Chinese were deemed special largely by virtue of just having made the trip, today’s Chinese students and Sinophiles find a more crowded field. Not that many years ago, being “not Chinese” was every China-residing foreigner’s most defining characteristic, like it or not. Today, economic opportunity has created a much different laowai landscape.

David Moser, the academic director for CET Beijing Chinese Studies and a performer of the Chinese comedy style “xiangsheng,” was one of just a handful of “stars” on Chinese TV in the 1990s. Obvious foreigners who spoke fluent Mandarin were rare, and the skill was a pass to TV and film roles. No longer.

“Now you have a whole gaggle of foreigners who are seriously trying to be media stars here,” said Moser. “They have managers, assistants, makeup artists, the whole lot. Some of them are pretty fiercely competitive and ‘career’ oriented. I find some of them ridiculous, quite frankly.” Not going lightly, Moser called much of the new wave “talent-less,” hauling with them great expectations that “all they have to do is show their face on TV and somehow they’ll be instant celebrities.” He concluded, “I can’t imagine they make a living at going on TV.”

But speaking Chinese is still just rare enough that Sui’s instant fame has scratched a blister of resentment than never really heals in China’s Chinese language-learner community, and his success has highlighted how Chinese demands on laowai entertainers have drastically changed in just a decade.

While reception to Sui’s video was largely positive, a few observers remarked that his command of the language and accents was less impressive because of his background. Sui’s mom is a white American and his father Chinese; he graduated high school in Madison, Wisconsin, but spent his formative years attending school in Beijing. Thus his language attainments were less remarkable, noted these commenters. This jealousy about one’s Chinese proficiency is characteristic of many Chinese learners.

David Moser put it more directly in our conversation. “Any idiot,” he said, can achieve French proficiency in a couple years, but that’s impossible in Chinese. “So there are a lot of foreigners struggling mightily for a long time, and some get frustrated at their lack of progress, and how they still sound like absolutely idiots after years of hard study.”

Brendan O’Kane, a Beijing-based translator and creator of the Popup Chinese podcast, told me he has a couple theories why Chinese learners can be so resentful, “One is that it’s still seen as a rare and special thing for someone who is not ethnically Asian to learn an Asian language, and native speakers of these languages are constantly telling students how clever and special they must be. The other is that it really does take a lot longer for a native speaker of English to get up to speed in Chinese than, say, Spanish. And when was the last time you heard someone credited as a ‘Spain Hand’ or ‘Spain Watcher?’ Or saw someone who studied German in college turn that into a major part of their identity?”

For Sui’s part, he doesn’t see himself as a laowai. “I’m just a dude with a unique background who lives in China. I call myself that to poke fun at people still using such a term in 2012.” To be or not to be a laowai is not a personal decision, a fact lamented recently by at least one long-time China hand who threw in the towel in now infamous fashion.

Sui, said, “Laowai or not, my understanding of all these different angles is going to be a major reason I succeed and make a place for myself on the market.”

***

Sui is a bit of a chameleon. By turns, he can appear either very Caucasian or very East Asian. He also can be interchangeably handsome or goofy looking. And he’s much larger, more muscular and athletic, in person than he appears on-screen (diaosi are known for being chubby and short). In a Lenovo viral video of Sui working out, he claims to have once been “a fatty,” saying he now weighs 35 jin (38.6 lbs) less than his peak 210 (231.5 lbs). In the Lenovo video, Sui starts off a goofball but ends up using the app’s GPS function to draw a heart. It’s disarmingly sweet. Maybe because I had just caught a few episodes of the show on DVD, the actor he most immediately reminded me of was Adam Driver, the tall, muscular, quixotic breakout male star of HBO’s “Girls.”

This is on display in the “12 Beijingers” video that made him famous. Some of the characters he lampoons — such as the French and the gay men — are typical, over-the-top stereotypes of both China’s expat foreigners and of foreigners in general. But of all 12 of the China-residing foreigners the skit skewers, Sui’s beer-swilling American is maybe the most frighteningly dead on, the impression detailed in ways that might not be immediately obvious to non-expats or even expats living in China who don’t speak the language. Sui doesn’t just perfectly mangle the American’s Chinese pronunciation, but also captures exactly how so many Chinese-speaking Americans — myself included — construct sentences.

One thing Sui has tried to avoid in the months since the “12 Beijingers” video went massively viral was to do the very easy thing and rehash the performance. In interviews, Sui has hinted that, while he finds nothing wrong with it, the stereotypes he exploited to such great acclaim, was hardly exceptional comedy.

But money is money. To launch its new instant coffee, Nescafe got Sui to ham up a few stereotypes, including various Chinese characters and a laowai. Why Nescafe would bring in Sui to launch its new “Premium White Coffee” (雀巢白咖啡) is open to speculation.

Before “12 Beijingers,” Sui struggled to make his way through China’s massive showbiz machinery, where templates rule and ingenuity is rare and often shut down prematurely. Sui was a host of the Henan TV Spring Festival gala show in 2006 and 2007. In 2009, a TV movie cast him as Edgar Snow, the journalist from Kansas who famously covered China’s Communist revolution. In the meantime, he played poker online to help pay the bills. In 2011, he appeared in the romantic comedy Single No More (光棍终结者). In January 2012, he filmed his small role in Fearless. It was about this time that he began using his online comedy shorts to tell stories that were decidedly Chinese. In one, he gets mistaken for Jeremy Lin. In another, he’s the ultimate China diaosi who cannot cover his share of a restaurant check. In March, he created the script for “12 Beijingers.”

How many millions of views Sui’s “12 Beijingers” video has logged is impossible to know. One upload on China video site Youku has 6.36 million. Various other posts of the video around Youku have between 50,000 and 250,000 views apiece. Competing video sharing site Toudou has several versions with more than 20,000 views each. On Youtube, two different uploads alone have over 550,000 views between them. Youtube is blocked in mainland China.

While the production values have shot up, Sui’s gentle satirization of Chinese culture has continued into his partnership with athletic-wear brand Puma. As the face of Puma’s “Puma Social” (“天生玩家” or “Born Player”) lifestyle brand web campaign, Sui anchors videos that are pop culturally modern but with, yes, “Chinese characteristics.” In one, after an opening that has him in the ubiquitous Chinese middle-school track suit seated alongside a grandmotherly woman, singing, Sui and pals — — all in Puma, of course — rap their way through a Chinese neighborhood. In another, an office turns into a musical game room. Another ends with a street party. But in each, Sui appears as a goofy Chinese caricature, be it the middle-school student or the tight ass traffic cop.

One Chinese blog has compared one of Sui’s Puma videos to “The Divine Comedy Oppa Gangnam.”

Sui’s unique style makes him popular with advertisers. But so do his Weibo followers. After the “12 Beijingers” video, Sui picked up hundreds of thousands more followers. He now has over 521,600. By comparison, Jeremy Lin has about 2.9 million. Julian Gaudfroy (朱力安), one of China’s most famous, current laowai performers, has 89,069.

In our conversation, Sui allowed that his strong social media presence helps him a bit. “The more followers and more people that interact with me on Weibo, the more valuable I am to future clients or directors or whatever productions.”

***

On the stage, Sui told a Hitler joke. Everyone laughed. Hitler is funny in any language. But Sui got his biggest reaction while running through his gaokao material, during which he pulled volunteers from the crowd on stage.

Many of the sticky youngsters in the crowd have just finished the gaokao, China’s test of tests that determines who goes to college and who becomes, well, a true diaosi. To frame the seriousness of the gaokao, here’s some context: one test administrator was recently sentenced to a year on jail for releasing test takers five minutes early. (He received a suspended sentence.)

For an MC, the quiz show format Sui used for the bit was nothing new. But the way Sui roasted the participants, to their embarrassment and to great audience laughter, while at the same time also sending up his diaosi self and the gaokao itself, is rare in China. Without one misstep, Sui very nimbly satirized the system without questioning its importance or legitimacy. This is a very revolutionary thing.

In addition to his role as the academic director for CET Beijing Chinese Studies, David Moser is a performer of and expert on the Chinese comedy style “xiangsheng,” or “crosstalk,” a traditional Chinese humor format, usually performed by a team, where the language’s numerous tones are leveraged for laughs both intellectual and bawdy. As Moser explained, while Chinese humor has traditionally included a few bits that rely on self-deprecation, “by far the most common persona is the bragging, over-confident smart-aleck.”

In American standup, of courses, self-deprecation plays a central role. And Moser believes that has to do with how American comedy is about catharsis, “about alienation, criticizing social phenomena, relating to the audience on the basis of nervousness, outrage, and confusion.” But, he said, “This is not common in Chinese humor, and downright unacceptable in most cases.” Which is why there hasn’t yet been a Chinese equivalent of Rodney Dangerfield.

Sui agreed with Moser’s point. “China definitely appreciates some self-deprecating humor, but very few celebrities are willing to [do it],” he said.

When I asked him if he knows who Rodney Dangerfield is, Sui said he “sounds familiar.”

***

In an epic treatise from 2004 titled “No laughing Matter: A hilarious investigation into the destruction of modern Chinese humor,” David Moser practically predicted the emergence of Mike Sui, writing, “The Chinese audience, now savvier and more internationalized, craves something spontaneous and honest, but crosstalk performers seem unable to provide it.” Moser tells of a famous, older Chinese crosstalk performer who “laments that his career in the PRC has left him incapable of performing comedy in any other way.” In conclusion, Moser wonders, “[W]here is this new generation to come from?”

Has he seen Mike Sui? I asked him. Yes he had, said Moser: “Mike is awesome. I laughed my head off. He’s got a fantastic ear. I think [Sui’s] is a new kind of direction for Chinese comedy. But as Chinese society, especially urban society, begins to increasingly resemble that of the west, this type of humor will definitely find an audience.”

“I think,” Moser added.

Related: The Foxconn Economy: From the State Dept. to China to Your Slideshow Pageviews

Abe Sauer is the author of the book How to be: North Dakota. Email him at abesauer AT gmail.com.

I waited on Frank Bruni and three others on his second-to-last visit to Graydon Carter’s Monkey Bar back in 2009, and unwittingly provided him with the kicker to his one-star review (the restaurant had been aiming for two)…. This, to me, is one of the stranger outcomes of restaurant reviews: that waiters are sometimes treated like they work in the public interest, or something. But as people argue over whether the New York Times is being classist in its scathing review of Guy Fieri’s restaurant, I’d like to point out the quieter classism that is inherent to the restaurant review: that very dispensable service employees are outed for minor errors by critics whose audience consists of those who can afford to eat at these places.

— Who’ll consider the servers, who often end up as collateral damage when restaurant critics come to pounce?