He Huang’s award-winning stand-up comedy show Crazy Broken Chinese is a smorgasbord of often darkly funny moments from the life of a woman who has survived both China’s one-child policy and Australia’s Got Talent.

The narrative largely focuses on the difficulty of being a single straight woman living in Melbourne when people often assume your name is actually your pronoun, but it covers a range of other topics as well, including Chinese history, Chinese cooking, Chinese calligraphy, American English, Australian English, Brazilian waxes, and certain sexual acts often euphemistically described as French or Greek.

Huang describes her disagreements with her staunchly Maoist parents and her misadventures dating men of different nationalities and ethnicities, all with an appropriate amount of swearing. I won’t say that she never exaggerates a little, but nearly everything she says has the ring – and sometimes the sting – of truth.

Hearing the laughter and vigorous applause at the sold-out show, it was clear that Huang is able to appeal to an extremely diverse audience even when it’s their own culture that’s the butt of the joke (possibly because they acknowledge that it’s a fair point, or possibly because they suspect it’ll be someone else’s turn next).

She’s an excellent raconteur who doesn’t rely on props or gimmicks - just good material, excellent comic timing, and a bare minimum of audience participation beyond the occasional call for a show of hands. She’s not always politically correct, and a few of her jokes are not for the squeamish or easily offended, but I feel confident recommending her show to anyone who is genuinely an adult or able to fake it for an hour.

If you miss ‘Crazy Broken Chinese’, or even if you don’t and just want more, He Huang will also be premiering her new comedy show, ‘Tiger Daughter vs The World’, at a variety of venues around Perth during FRINGE WORLD.