Brian Tseng: He Can Calculate a Punchline, but Not Society

30-second overview: Born in 1990, Brian Tseng was the first performer in Taiwan to bring stand-up comedy into Taipei Arena, and the central figure behind The Night Night Show with Brian Tseng (2018-2020). He holds dual degrees in foreign languages and psychology from National Taiwan University, dual master's degrees in Brain and Mind Sciences from University College London and Integrative Biology from Pierre and Marie Curie University, yet on the eve of applying to PhD programs he turned around and co-founded STR Network. Using the research methods of a neuroscientist, he treated jokes as experiments and the stage as a laboratory, moving Taiwanese talk shows in seven years from open mics at Comedy Club to a 13,000-person venue. That same precision also led him, in the 2019 Cheng Nan-jung joke, the 2023 delivery-worker video, and the 2025 entertainment-tax lawsuit, to repeatedly miscalculate the weight of social emotion. The manner of those miscalculations happens to form the cost curve of Taiwan's stand-up comedy industrialization over the past decade.

Headphones on a Jianguo High School Desk

Sometime during a ten-minute break in the mid-2000s, inside a classroom at Taipei Municipal Jianguo High School, a teenage boy put on an MP3 player lent to him by a classmate and heard a stand-up recording by Indo-Canadian comedian Russell Peters. Peters specialized in catching audiences through imitations of different ethnic accents, jokes about cultural difference, and ethnic stereotypes. After his 2004 Canadian Comedy Now! special was uploaded to YouTube, he went viral, ranked third on Forbes's list of the world's highest-paid comedians in 2013, and became the first comedian in history to receive a Netflix stand-up special¹.

For Brian Tseng, that ten minutes was a structural accident. A Mirror Media reporter later described him in an interview as having "laughed until he fell to the floor, and fell in love with stand-up comedy"². The seed was planted inside his extremely rational mind, but it would take more than another decade to sprout.

Tseng's resume is a standard Taiwanese "Tianlongguo" elite blueprint: a path associated with Taipei's privileged establishment. His father, Wen-yi Tseng, studied in National Tsing Hua University's Department of Nuclear Engineering, earned a post-baccalaureate medical degree from National Taiwan University College of Medicine, received a PhD in radiological sciences from the MIT Department of Nuclear Engineering, conducted postdoctoral research and taught radiological sciences at Harvard Medical School, and is now a professor at National Taiwan University College of Medicine, researching brain-imaging techniques for dementia³. Brian Tseng himself double-majored in foreign languages and psychology at National Taiwan University, graduating second in a class of 132 with a GPA of 4.19/4.3. He then studied for a master's degree in Brain and Mind Sciences at University College London (UCL), before earning a master's degree in Integrative Biology at Pierre and Marie Curie University in France. He speaks fluent English and French⁴⁵.

📝 Curator's note: Brian Tseng's rise symbolizes one form of rebellion within Taiwan's "academic overachiever culture." He did not leave the system. He turned the research methods he learned inside the system back on the system itself, using the same rigor to dissect the sources of jokes produced by the system's own operation.

"Da Nai Wei Wei": A Miscalculated Bet

In 2017, Brian Tseng, then preparing to apply for neuroscience PhD programs, gave himself a one-year "willful period" and joined the new-media company Taiwan Bar as a producer and writer. In November that year, under the stage name "Gang Gang," he posted a video satirizing Taiwanese young people's abbreviation culture: "Da Nai Wei Wei" (short for "large iced milk tea, light sugar, light ice"). In less than two days it accumulated more than 400,000 views on Facebook, ultimately landing at about 1.61 million views and 450,000 likes⁶⁷. In October of the same year, he won the finals of the stand-up newcomer competition at Comedy Club Taipei⁸.

After he went viral, the equation quickly wrote itself. In a 2024 Mirror Media interview, Tseng said: "After the video went viral, I received many sponsored-content and commercial-performance offers. My side income was six or seven times my main job."² For a 27-year-old student who had originally planned to enter a neuroscience laboratory, this was a GPA-calculated bet. He later admitted in an interview with Bios Monthly the actual dimensions of his academic path: "My academic path had already reached its end"; "No matter which laboratory I entered, I felt my basic science was weaker than other people's"⁹.

The neuroscience PhD plan was postponed indefinitely. On July 31, 2018, Brian Tseng and Hauer Hsieh (DJ Hauer) co-founded STR Network Co., Ltd., corporatizing what had originally been an after-work hobby they practiced in bars¹⁰. The Chinese name "Satai'er" is a phonetic rendering of the English word "satire." Hsieh later described in a company statement that they believed "talk shows, as 'critical entertainment,' would soon sweep the entire Chinese-speaking world and become an outlet for people"¹¹.

💡 Did you know: Brian Tseng's academic background at NTU is directly connected to the way he later studied jokes. In an interview with CNA Culture+ he said: "I studied foreign languages in college; literature talks about what people have in common. I studied brain neuroscience in graduate school; that also talks about what people have in common, but from a scientific perspective."¹² Now he simply does the same thing by telling jokes: writing ten versions of every bit, treating the stage as a laboratory, and testing which version can earn more laughter.

STR Network's Algorithm

On August 20, 2018, the pilot episode of the first season of The Night Night Show with Brian Tseng went online. In just five days the program attracted 130,000 views¹³. The show transplanted the format of the American late-night talk show to Taiwan. STR Network's own official account described it as a response to a gap: Taiwanese audiences paid close attention to political and social issues, yet lacked American-style talk shows such as The Daily Show and Last Week Tonight¹⁴. The first season was supported by online crowdfunding. STR Network worked with Backer-Founder to open a fundraising page, originally hoping to raise NT$3 million from consumer-side supporters, but the team budget for the entire first season remained in deficit¹⁴. It was also Taiwan's first talk show to open itself to online crowdfunding¹⁴.

By June 2019, the YouTube channel for The Night Night Show with Brian Tseng had accumulated 550,000 subscribers and more than 57 million views¹⁴. Three 2020 presidential candidates, Tsai Ing-wen, Han Kuo-yu, and James Soong, successively entered STR Network's studio. Tsai Ing-wen participated in the first recording of season two on April 20, 2019; after the episode aired, it passed one million views in three days. On the show she addressed Lai Ching-te: "One plus one must be greater than two. Supporters want to see us cooperate, so we should cooperate."¹⁵¹⁶ When Han Kuo-yu appeared on the show in December 2019, his only request was: "Don't make jokes about my hairstyle." Over the full 18-minute recording, Tseng called him "the most familiar stranger since the show began"¹⁷. James Soong entered the studio on December 18, conversed with Tseng in French on-site, and mistakenly called the movie character "Iron Man" "King Kong Man," prompting the entire audience to laugh¹⁸.

But in July 2020, political-donation income-and-expenditure statements released by the Control Yuan revealed the fee structure for the three presidential candidates' appearances: Han Kuo-yu's camp paid NT$315,000, Tsai Ing-wen's camp paid NT$130,000, and James Soong paid nothing¹⁹. The NT$185,000 gap sparked discussion over transparency in KOL pricing. Tseng later publicly apologized in an 18-minute video and explained the logic behind the fees¹⁹.

⚠️ Contested view: Politicians appearing on The Night Night Show with Brian Tseng was not unprecedented in Taiwan; in the 2000s, Quanmin Da Mengguo had already shown an early form of political talk show. What made The Night Night Show different was its "individual author model": the host was also the author, editor, sponsorship broker, and final decision-maker on the fee structure. This pushed political talk shows from collective production inside a television station's production department into the individual entrepreneurship model of the KOL economy. It was also the structural root of the show's later controversies: a misjudgment by the individual author could be directly magnified into a public event.

STR Network's corporate structure likewise marked a new model. As of the end of 2024, the company had 11-50 employees and paid-in capital of NT$10.406 million (up from NT$6.5 million in September 2023)²⁰²¹. In addition to Brian Tseng, its artists included Hello Horlong, Lung Lung, Joseph Lin, and Dakeai¹¹. Brian Tseng was chair, Pan Wei-hsiang (Hawkins) was CEO, and Hauer Hsieh remained at the company as a director and production consultant¹¹. Compared with traditional television stations of the same period, this was a relatively small KOL/content-production company, but it upgraded talk shows from an amateur hobby into an industry capable of producing financial statements.

📝 Curator's note: Brian Tseng proved that comedy in Taiwan could be a precise "industry," not just amateur performance. He used box-office numbers to prove that Taiwanese audiences were willing to pay for the "art of offense." But the cost of this industrialization would not begin to show itself until August 2019.

There Will Be Two Cheng Nan-jungs in the Underworld

In early August 2019, a screenshot from an open mic associated with The Night Night Show with Brian Tseng circulated online. The setting was one in which comedians practiced bits and tested material outside the public program; within the industry, it was tacitly understood as a "private, non-public" performance space²². In the screenshot, Tseng's bit was: "When something is burned in the human world, the underworld receives another identical thing. So after Cheng Nan-jung self-immolated, there would be two Cheng Nan-jungs in the underworld."²²

Social backlash formed within 48 hours. Cheng Nan-jung self-immolated on April 7, 1989, in the office of Freedom Era Weekly to fight for 100 percent freedom of speech. At that moment, exactly 30 years and four months had passed. This history is a foundational memory in Taiwan's post-martial-law context of freedom of speech. On August 9, Brian Tseng issued an apology on Facebook: "I am very sorry that my immature improvised transition caused many negative emotions for the family and for seniors who have defended freedom of speech. I hereby offer my deepest apology"; "A few days ago, I did not think I needed to clarify anything over a rumored screenshot. But after the incident spread over the past few days, I admit that facts, verification, context, the intention of language, narrative and performance method, not to mention the nature and purpose of comedy, none of these are important. The effect caused when speech spreads outward is reality." In the same statement he announced: "Beginning with season four of The Night Night Show, STR Network will seek a new host."²³²⁴

STR Network's initial response was to announce a suspension of cooperation with Brian Tseng²⁵. CEO Hauer Hsieh later stated publicly that Tseng's joke about Cheng Nan-jung was a private act and did not violate the principles of comedy or freedom of speech; based on creative freedom and respect for employees, the company decided after evaluation to maintain its cooperative relationship with Tseng²⁵. The Cheng Nan-jung Foundation also responded publicly to the incident. Although it did not exert pressure on Tseng personally, it restored freedom of speech to what it had always been: a boundary repeatedly negotiated by society, not a right asserted unilaterally by any individual²⁶.

✦ Closing aphorism: In a 2024 Mirror Media interview, Tseng reflected on this episode by saying: "At least the rudder changed direction. I don't want to go down the old path."² The "rudder" is the steering mechanism of a boat; he meant that the boat was still moving, just no longer in its original direction. But the line also leaves a small gap: the boat's direction changed, but that does not mean he admitted the original path was wrong.

On January 18, 2020, after recording the final episode of season three, The Night Night Show with Brian Tseng formally ended its third season (three seasons totaling 32 official episodes plus the pilot)¹⁴. Tseng handed over the hosting role, and The Night Night Show went silent for three years. Not until October 28, 2023, did STR Network launch The Night Night Show with Hello Horlong, hosted by Hello Horlong, announcing the second generation of the brand²⁷.

NT$22.83 Million and a Nonexistent Lieutenant-Colonel Pilot

On March 11 and 12, 2022, Brian Tseng held three performances of an "interesting lecture," Triple Standard, at Taipei Music Center. This was his first large-scale solo show after leaving The Night Night Show as host. Total ticket revenue for the three shows reached NT$22,835,950²⁸²⁹.

The box office exploded, but the script over the next few years was rewritten into another arena: the courtroom.

After the performance, Taipei City's Revenue Service determined that Triple Standard was an entertainment activity and that NT$267,009 in entertainment tax had to be paid. Because it was unpaid, the agency imposed a sevenfold penalty of NT$1,869,063 under the Entertainment Tax Act²⁸²⁹. STR Network filed suit, arguing that Triple Standard was an "interesting lecture," not an entertainment performance, and should not be subject to entertainment tax. After losing in the first instance and appealing, the company lost again in September 2025 when the Taipei High Administrative Court dismissed the appeal in the second instance, finalizing the case.

The court's reasoning read almost like a comedy breakdown: "Brian Tseng stood alone onstage, using humorous, amusing, exaggerated facial expressions and rhythmic bodily movement as performance methods to interpret the double standards in his personal life or in society toward the same thing, making the audience laugh, and displaying his wit, eloquence, and bodily rhythm as performance methods to entertain the audience. This is sufficient to show that the substantive performance content presented by the activity was indeed Brian Tseng performing in the form of stand-up comedy with an entertainment effect." The first-instance judgment also wrote: "STR Network clearly knew that lectures and stand-up comedy are different, yet merely deliberately changed the performance name to 'lecture,' and did not complete tax-exemption or tax-collection procedures before the activity as required by the Entertainment Tax Act, clearly showing intent to evade entertainment tax."²⁸²⁹

On the day the judgment came down, Tseng announced on Facebook that he would put Triple Standard on YouTube for a 48-hour marathon livestream and called on viewers to buy tickets, saying he "intended to use this revenue to pay the NT$260,000 tax and NT$1.86 million fine"³⁰. The tone was self-deprecating, but the logic was precise: he converted a legal defeat into material for yet another bit.

But NT$22.83 million was not the year's heaviest number. On May 27 of the same year (2023), Brian Tseng held his solo stand-up special BALLBREAKER at Taipei Arena. The 90-minute performance drew about 13,000 audience members, making him the first stand-up comedian in Taiwan's history to perform at Taipei Arena³¹³². Ticket prices ranged from the "egg-white section" at NT$800-3,800, to the "egg-yolk section" at NT$6,000, to the top-tier "sucker seat" at NT$100,000 each³³.

As the box office doubled, a larger miscalculation took place at the end of the year. On December 28, 2023, Brian Tseng posted a video on Facebook: in cooperation with foodpanda, he gave NT$100,000 from his endorsement fee back to delivery workers in the form of tips. The final male delivery worker received NT$50,000 alone. In the video, the delivery worker said he had "been a career soldier for 30 years," was "retired from the Air Force as a lieutenant colonel," had "crashed into the sea off Hsinchu more than ten years ago," and that his wife had died in a car accident while bringing liquid food to him during his hospitalization. He was now a single father raising three children alone³⁴.

On December 29, Air Force Command reviewed pilots who had "crashed into the sea and been rescued" over the past 20 years and concluded: "All are currently employed in civil aviation or the Air Force; there is no such lieutenant-colonel pilot as claimed by the influencer."³⁴ The same day, Tseng urgently took down the video and publicly stated: "Multiple parties have contacted us to say that the video does not match the facts. We are clarifying the situation, and the video has been taken down pending further explanation."³⁴

At midnight on December 30, Taiwan People's Party legislative candidate Chen Kai-ning publicly acknowledged that the "lieutenant-colonel delivery worker" in the video was her father. She also clarified that "my mother has not passed away." In her apology she said: "I am very sorry that my personal family matters have occupied public space, and very sorry for affecting the image of the national military and delivery workers. Most importantly, I caused Brian Tseng to be questioned over a fabrication controversy."³⁵³⁶³⁷.

⚠️ Contested view: The miscalculation in the delivery-worker video did not lie with Tseng himself; the interviewee's family story was fabricated. But the reason the controversy expanded to the level of a fictional 30-year lieutenant-colonel pilot was that the setup of "trading NT$100,000 in tips for a moving video" itself contained built-in emotional leverage. The sadder the story, the more worthy it became, so the storyteller had an incentive to enlarge the story. Tseng used a neuroscientist's precision to calculate causal chains in punchlines, but failed to calculate the structural bias inside warm human-interest narratives. This miscalculation shares the same root cause as the 2019 Cheng Nan-jung joke: when processing signals of social emotion, he used a laboratory SNR (signal-to-noise ratio) model, not the thickness of public life.

B1, No. 286 Linsen North Road: After the Miscalculations

At the end of 2019, while the controversy over the Cheng Nan-jung joke had not yet ended, Brian Tseng, stand-up comedian Danny Smile, well-known comedian Sam Yarborough, and Taiwanese craft-beer brand 23 Brewing Company jointly built Two Three Comedy Club, which opened at B1, No. 286 Linsen North Road, Zhongshan District, Taipei³⁸³⁹. The venue could hold about 200 audience members and was Taiwan's first comedy bar with performances in both Chinese and English. Tseng served as director of Chinese programming, personally hosting the Chinese open mic every Thursday night. English shows took place on Mondays and Wednesdays, Chinese shows on Tuesdays and Thursdays, and ticketed shows on weekends³⁸³⁹.

Time kept moving. After the Taipei Arena show in May 2023, on June 21 and 22, 2024, he and Hello Horlong collaborated in Taipei on the stand-up comedy tour Storm in a Bubble Tea Cup, title-sponsored by Bed World⁴⁰. On July 5, 2025, he held BROAN BURN 2025 at Taipei Music Center, serving as the main act for the first time. Shen Yu-lin served as "Generalissimo of the Roast," and Peeta, Yang Kuei-chih, Chien Shao-nien, Froggy Chiu, Insectros, Da Come, Pan Ruo-di, and others performed together. During the show, Tseng announced that he would hold solo shows at Kaohsiung Music Center on October 25 and 26 of the same year⁴¹.

But STR Network was not calm during these years. On January 20, 2024, The Night Night Show with Hello Horlong invited former CCTV reporter Wang Zhi'an into the studio. In the interview, Wang commented on Taiwan's election by saying politicians had "pushed disabled people up there to stir emotion" and imitated a disabled person on the spot, triggering social backlash. The Mainland Affairs Council announced that "from today, his entry permit is revoked, and he is barred from coming to Taiwan for five years." As of January 25, seven program sponsors had terminated or suspended cooperation with The Night Night Show with Hello Horlong. Taiwan Statebuilding Party filed a lawsuit against STR Network⁴². On June 23, 2025, STR Network issued a statement on its official Threads account: "STR Network Co., Ltd. and contracted artist Hello Horlong, due to differences in philosophy, terminate both parties' management contract effective today."⁴³ Media reports said that the first season of The Night Night Show with Hello Horlong alone lost about NT$5 million, and that the reasons for termination included not only damage to Hello Horlong's personal image, but also structural problems such as the program's long-term difficulty booking major guests and the loss of sponsors⁴⁴.

📝 Curator's note: Brian Tseng, Hello Horlong, Sam Yarborough, Lung Lung, Joseph Lin, and Huang Hao-ping: this stand-up circle is not Brian Tseng's story alone. Taiwan's stand-up comedy scene evolved over more than a decade, from the founding of Comedy Club Taipei in May 2007, with 6,000 accumulated performances and 250,000 audience visits⁴⁵⁴⁶, to the ticketed performances begun in 2008 by Yubung Comedy, a Japanese-style manzai troupe paying homage to Japan's Yoshimoto Kogyo⁴⁷, to STR Network's entry in 2018. Tseng is the most thoroughly industrialized node in this ecosystem: author, company chair, and high-frequency origin point of controversy.

⚠️ Contested view: In an interview with VERSE, Tseng's attitude toward "STR Network fans" ran more counter to expectations than that of a typical KOL: "I actually really hate STR Network's fans." He added: "But this environment is one I cultivated myself." On offensive boundaries, he said: "Once you leave a negative impression, the effort it takes to whitewash yourself later is certainly far greater than taking the right path from the beginning."⁴⁸ This quotation places his self-awareness in a rare position: he knows that the type of audience he accumulated is itself a byproduct of miscalculation.

If the camera pulls back to a larger scale, the explosion of Taiwanese stand-up over the past decade happens to correspond to the opposite curve across the strait. In May 2014, Ye Feng, He Xiaoxi, Li Dan, and others co-founded Xiaoguo Culture. In 2017, the first season of Rock & Roast aired on Tencent Video, and the company's valuation rose that year to about RMB 1.2 billion⁴⁹. On May 13, 2023, Xiaoguo artist Li Haoshi (stage name HOUSE), while performing, described two stray dogs he had adopted chasing squirrels as having "excellent conduct, capable of winning battles" and was reported. On May 17, the Beijing Municipal Culture and Tourism Bureau fined Xiaoguo Culture more than RMB 13.35 million and indefinitely suspended all of its performances in Beijing. The sixth season of Rock & Roast died before birth, and the company's valuation lost RMB 4 billion⁵⁰. In a 2019 CNA interview, Tseng had already marked this dividing line: "Just look at what happened to hip-hop." The decision not to enter China had been made four years in advance⁵¹. The shutdown of stand-up in China and the explosion of stand-up in Taiwan form the most dramatic cross-strait comparison in cultural production during the eight years from 2018 to 2025.

💡 Did you know: Brian Tseng has an extremely scientific description of his own working method. When he answered a reporter's questions in a Mirror Media interview, his tone was described as: "One question, one answer. Every answer had no unnecessary extension. They were all rigorous and proper; I almost thought I was speaking with AI."² His obsession with English abbreviations is an extension of the same precision: "I hope the example you give is the English word 'versus.' I said that word's abbreviation is VS., with no dot in the middle, not V.S. I scolded people about it for a long time, but everyone still misuses it."² In his Bios Monthly interview, his philosophy of the essence of jokes was also research-oriented: "There are only jokes that are not funny; there are no topics that cannot be joked about"; "Either everything can be mocked, or nothing can be mocked. There is no middle ground."⁹ On box office, he said, "I actually do things pretty scientifically": treating Hello Horlong's effect on ticket sales as a hypothesis and preparing to design an experiment to test whether it could be falsified².

Who Pays the Price for Mismeasurement

In late September 2025, on the day the Taipei High Administrative Court finalized its second-instance judgment, Brian Tseng announced on Facebook that Triple Standard would run as a 48-hour marathon livestream on YouTube. The judgment used the most precise legal language to take away the definitional authority over comedy that he had accumulated over eight years: "was indeed Brian Tseng performing in the form of stand-up comedy with an entertainment effect." It was not a "lecture," not an "interesting lecture," and not anything else he attempted to reframe through language.

From the autumn of 2017, when the "Da Nai Wei Wei" video went viral and he decided to abandon the PhD, to the day the court judgment came down in 2025, Brian Tseng spent eight years defining the comedy of an era. At the same time, he also spent eight years demonstrating how an extremely rational person could repeatedly miscalculate the weight of emotion in Taiwanese society. The Cheng Nan-jung joke missed once. The delivery-worker video missed once. The entertainment-tax framing missed once. Each time, it was not because he wrote bad jokes. In engineering terms, each one was an operation precise enough to produce financial statements. The point of failure was always the same: he used the laboratory model of signal-to-noise ratio to calculate the emotional weight of public space. Laboratory SNR assumes emotion is noise that can be precisely filtered out. But in society, emotion itself is signal.

In the basement of Two Three Comedy Club at No. 286 Linsen North Road, Tseng still personally hosts the Chinese open mic on Thursday nights. Newcomers test bits under a small spotlight, while audience members collect every punchline as research data. From the founding of Comedy Club Taipei in 2007, to the ticketed performances of Yubung Comedy in 2008, to the founding of STR Network in 2018, to the solo shows at Kaohsiung Music Center in 2025, Taiwan's decade-long industrialization curve for stand-up comedy places Brian Tseng at its most controversial turning point: the position that both laid the industry's foundation and paid its highest emotional cost.

✦ Closing aphorism: He can calculate the causal chain of a punchline, but cannot calculate the weight society gives to emotion. That miscalculation happens to be the very cost curve that has allowed Taiwanese stand-up comedy to exist over the past decade. If someone had told Tseng in 2017 that he would spend eight years simultaneously defining and damaging an era of comedy, he probably would have treated the sentence as an unverified hypothesis and returned to the laboratory to design an experiment.

Further Reading:

• Tsai Ing-wen — The first presidential candidate to enter The Night Night Show with Brian Tseng studio in 2019
• Han Kuo-yu — The most familiar stranger of the same season; his only request was that no one joke about his hairstyle
• Cheng Nan-jung — The tangwai activist who self-immolated in 1989 in pursuit of 100 percent freedom of speech, and became the starting point of Tseng's miscalculations in 2019

Image Sources

The main materials used in writing this article were public reports, STR Network's official channels, Brian Tseng's personal interviews, and public government information. No image files are embedded in the article. The hero and inline image materials are temporarily marked as a no-media boundary in this EVOLVE round. They will be added later under a fair-use editorial-commentary scope after suitable cached-resolution STR Network official press images or public-space photos of Comedy Club Taipei are found, to be handled in a separate heal commit.

References