Meet the Comedians: The Skills Behind the Laughs (Hybrid Workshop)
October 16, 2025, 4:00 pm to 5:00 pm
🎠Join international comedians Joanna Sio & Vivek Mahbubani for an interactive workshop on all things comedy!
Date: October 16, 2025
Time: 4:00 - 5:00pm
Location: Dodson Room, UBC Point Grey
Virtual Option: Zoom [join here] | Meeting ID: 616 3073 3190 | Passcode: 951093
About the Workshop
Join Joanna Sio, a linguist and stand-up comedian, and Vivek Mahbubani, a bilingual comedian from Hong Kong, for a fun, interactive, and insightful workshop exploring the craft of comedy - from creation to performance.
Expect a lively mix of:
- Behind-the-Scenes Sharing: How comedians develop material from idea to performance.
- Performance Insights: Real-life experiences from the stage.
- Interactive Games: Light-hearted, connection-building activities to get you thinking and laughing.
- Q&A Session: Ask anything! From stage fright to creative routines.
Who is it for?
- Anyone curious about the creative process and power of humour.
- Students and faculty from any discipline - all are welcome!
Joanna and Vivek are experienced comedians with a passion for storytelling, connection, and helping others tap into their creative voice. Together, they bring a wealth of knowledge, warmth, and humour to every room they’re in.
Speakers
Joanna Sio
Joanna Sio is what happens when a linguist walks into a comedy club and never leaves. A mother, a linguist, and a comedian (sometimes all at once, and often on very little sleep), she brings a unique blend of intellect, humor, and humanity to every stage she steps on—academic or otherwise.
A leading expert on Cantonese grammar and the creator of digital resources like the Cantonese Wordnet, Joanna has published extensively on the syntax of Cantonese. From 2022 to 2024, she served as President of the European Association of Chinese Linguistics and currently sits on the board of the International Association of Chinese Linguistics. When she’s not dissecting Cantonese sentences, she is also turning punchlines into academic insight, with research focusing on humour in improvisation and stand-up comedy.
As a stand-up comedian, she has performed across Asia, Australia, Europe, and North America, bringing linguistic agility and cultural wit to stages from the Singapore Comedy Fringe and the Magners International Comedy Festival to the Melbourne International Comedy Festival (as part of Comedy Zone Asia) and beyond. She was 1st runner-up at the 2012 Hong Kong International Comedy Competition and represented Hong Kong in the Laugh Factory's Funniest Person in the World Competition in 2016.
Her solo shows, including No Boyfriend No Fries and Bohemian Hongkie, have hit festivals such as the Perth Fringe World, Sziget Festival, Tallinn Fringe, and Women in Comedy Festival Manchester. She also gave a TEDx talk titled Learning to Stand-Up at the National University of Singapore in 2015, and founded Singapore's improv troupe The Latecomers, which she directed until 2017.
Whether she's on stage or in the seminar room, Joanna believes that humour and linguistics are just two dialects of the same human story—both manifestations of our cognitive creativity and our deep need to connect.
Vivek Mahbubani
Vivek Mahbubani is a Hong Kong-bred bilingual stand-up comedian performing in both Cantonese and English. Having been crowned the Funniest Person (in Chinese) in Hong Kong in 2007 followed by his victory in the English category at the Hong Kong International Comedy Competition in 2008, Vivek has had the opportunity to take his sense of humour all over the world. Having been ranked as the top comedian in Hong Kong, in 2014, the World Famous Laugh Factory in USA ranked Vivek as one of the top 10 comedians in their Annual Funniest Person in the World Competition. In 2015, he was handpicked as one of the comedians to represent Asia’s best in Melbourne International Comedy Festival’s inaugural “Comedy Zone Asia” shows while in 2016, he was featured in Comedy Central’s first ever “Stand up Asia!”. He also became one of the recipients of the 2018 Hong Kong Ten Outstanding Young Persons (TOYP) Selection Award. One of Vivek’s passions is reading and his favourite book is Sun Tzu’s Art of War. Oddly, his favourite colour is hot pink.
This comedy event is cohosted by UBC Language Sciences and UBC Cantonese as part of the Cantonese 10th anniversary celebration. It is sponsored by UBC Asian Studies, UBC ACRE and UBC Pop Culture Clusters.
