Taiwanese pop icon at his death-camp-themed bar, The Jail
Jacky Wu is, as everyone in Taiwan knows, the most popular guy on local television. He hosts six separate variety talk shows for a grand total of 21 hours of airtime a week. He was Channel V's "Favorite Chinese Person of the Year" in 2000. He owns a dozen restaurants, a record label that just put out the year's hottest new Mando-pop star and his own cable channel, ET Jacky. And he's the progenitor of "pighead" and dozens of other meaningless, ubiquitous catchphrases that have found their way into the evening news and the lexicon of seemingly every Taiwanese between the ages of four and 64. Jacky is also quite a polarizing figure. He has pissed off journalists, chefs, soccer moms, a French actress, the Israeli not-quite-ambassador and the all-powerful Government Information Office (GIO).
Jacky Wu is, as far as anyone knows, the only Taiwan star ever dubbed a "phenomenon." And at 38, he still appears to derive intense pleasure from making puns about girls and their bra cups. And then subjecting said girls to blindfolds and vats full of crocodiles. And then forcing said girls to drink entire bottles of raw eggs. Or soy sauce. Or perhaps a combination of the two.
Jacky is, in other words, Greater China's premier gross-out comic. But he wrestles with another side: the Good Jacky. And today he happens to be on his best behavior. Groomed. Suit. Much product in the hair. An inexhaustible supply of good lines, twisted idioms, clever witticisms, Deep Thoughts. He wants to discuss his new political talk show with pro-independence firebrand Sisy Chen. He wants to talk about how more women should be like Sisy and get into politics. There is nary a reference to breasts and no sign of the host who just months ago persuaded members of a Korean basketball team to crawl half-naked through a waist-deep vat of ice. Today he feels like talking about the importance of keeping up with current affairs.
Come on, Jacky. Be the pighead we know you are. Your political show gets terrible ratings, and gross-out, as a genre, never had it so good. Just look at Tom Green, the Canadian demigod of gross. He just made his second huge feature film, and it's gotten terrible reviews, but what does the media know anyway? He's still got Drew Barrymore. And what about MTV's beyond-gross show Jackass, which features cool dudes doing stuff like scuba diving in sewage treatment plants and has helped bring the network a 33% increase in prime-time viewers in that coveted 25-to-34 age range? MTV won't broadcast Jackass in any Asian country outside the Philippines. It's up to you, Jacky, to serve as the Jackass of the Mandarin-speaking world!
But Jacky loves talking about Big Picture stuffmaturity, retirement, Giving Back, his lifelong dream of leveraging off his popular persona for the virtuous purpose of educating children. He has been doing this feel-good blabber a lot these days. Sometimes, half in jest, he talks about giving it all up and running for political office. But today, the message is all about educating the masses. He jumps out of his seat, grabs a marker and draws a triangle on the whiteboard to demonstrate. A-squared plus B-squared equals C-squared. He grins.
The Pythagorean theorem. Somewhere in Nantou county, a geometry teacher is getting a kick out of this. Needless to say, the young Wu Tsung-hsien was never teacher's pet. He dropped out of university, studied art, disappointed his father, worked at a gas station during the day and played guitar at divey coastal clubs at night. On good nights, he made $165 and had to split it with a partner. (These days, if you believe the tabloidsalthough there's no reason you shouldhis going rate is twice that per minute of airtime.)
Wu was always a workhorse of a performer. Before he made it on TV, he made it big on the college circuit, racking up, he estimates, about 2,000 visits to college campuses during the early '90s. "Working like that, I learned to establish Three No's with regard to my work," he jokes, spoofing the trio of taboos Beijing tries to enforce in its political dealing with Taipei. "No meetings, no rehearsals and no cuts." But it was also on those campuses, colleagues say, that Jacky really forged a connection with the younger, more liberal generation of Taiwanese that emerged after the dramatic 1989 lifting of martial law. "The generation that loves Jacky Wu," explains his political show cohost Sisy Chen, "laughs at different things. They didn't grow up with the same cares or taboos we did. They have a much more lighthearted attitude about their Taiwanese identity."
One thing the lighthearted generation seems particularly to identify with: Japan. In the early '90s, Japanese TV was all about puerile, slapstick, cheap-to-make variety shows: the original Jackasses. It wasn't long before Taiwan's TV stations began to scale back on traditional operas and inject a little variety into their lineups, too. Jacky was hired as a host for a Sunday evening show in 1993, and within months he was calling the shots on his own game show Guess, which is still one of the island's highest-ranked shows.
"I was in the right place at the right time," Jacky says modestly about his rise to phenomenon-dom. But given a set and an audience, the guy was a natural. He could handle anyone, he knew how to choose cohosts and, most importantly, he knew how to give every word in the Mandarin language a connotation pertaining to sex, and get those words past the pseudo censors at the GIO. Like "grandmother." Nai-nai. Sounds like slang for breasts. "How's your nai-nai?" he'll ask a nubile young guest, who will then turn the color of chewed-up betel nut. "Oh, well ex-cuse me, girl!" he'll get defensive. "I was just wondering how your family was doing!"
"Think of American Pie," says Julian Lee, an entertainment writer for United Daily News, referring to America's seminal gross-out film of 1999. "It's the same sort of thing. Same kind of humor. Same demographic. Jacky just has to be a little more careful, because everything he does is prime time."
This is not to say that there haven't been occasions when Wu was notoriously un-careful. The GIO has fined him eight times. He seems most in his element when he centers a show around, say, a bunch of girls who all lost their virginity at bars, or a pack of speedo-clad male strippers he's about to subject to the ice treatment. Last May, Li Yuen-chiu, a respected broadcast journalist, held a press conference to admonish Jacky after catching him interview a selfprofessed "slut" on the subject of her sexual exploits in junior high and calling home frantically to make sure her 10-year-old wasn't watching the prime-time show. He wasn't, but the point, Li argued, was that thousands of pre-bedtime 10-year-olds were.
Jacky has a cute-but-curt retort for the Ms. Lis of Taiwan: "I don't answer to the media. I answer to the Taiwanese people and the Mandarin-speaking world." And more often than not, if you're measuring in ratings and revenues, the Mandarin-speaking world comes to his defense. "The guy is a genius," marvels Channel V veejay David Wu, a.k.a. the "Wu-Man" (he's Taiwan television's second best-known Wu). "Jacky is truly immune to bad press, basically because he knows what his audience likes. I don't know how he does it. I just know that, no way could I get away with interviewing call girls at Channel V."
Jacky and his people tend to play down his reliance on crude sex jokes, and play up his less prurient achievements, like supplying the dragon's voice in the Mandarin version of Disney's Mulan, or giving more than any other Taiwan entertainer to the 1999 earthquake cleanup effort, or that he feels more women should be in politics. But late one Sunday night over a few Bloody Marys at Jacky's death-camp-themed bar, the Jail (if you were wondering what Jacky did to piss off the Israelis, this is it), Jacky's longtime friend and business partner J.R. Yang, who manages his music label Alpha Records, talks about Jacky's comedy. "When you get down to it, there are two types of joke," he says. "Jokes about politics; jokes about sex. Jacky has the sex part down." The politics? Hey, it's a free, er, "country." Maybe Jacky "the Pighead" will pull a Jesse "the Body." Better yet, maybe he'll stick with being Gross-Out Jacky.